The Awakened Heart: A Podcast for Healing Women
The Awakened Heart: A Podcast for Healing Women is a safe space for trauma survivors and neurodivergent women ready to claim their voice, soften into their truth and feel at home with themselves.
I’m Autumn Moran, a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), certified Life Coach, and 500-hour trained yoga instructor who understands this journey intimately as a neurodivergent woman, trauma survivor and as a therapist and life coach.
Each week, I offer soulful episodes where I intertwine my lived experiences with insights from my therapy practice all with the goal to help women unmask and find peace in their lives by healing trauma and learning how to accommodate their neurodivergence.
Through real talk, mindfulness practices, and gentle healing approaches rooted in trauma-informed wisdom and nervous system care, you’ll find practical tools to help you feel safe in your body, seen in your story and supported in your journey.
This is your sanctuary to soften, heal, and remember that you were and are never too much.
Work with me: Click the link to schedule a free 15 minute consultation.
The Awakened Heart: A Podcast for Healing Women
When Your Body Feels Like The Enemy After Sexual Trauma
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
We name the rage that has no clean target, the anger that turns inward toward your own body after sexual trauma. We unpack why your body responded the way it did and how healing can begin with safety, ownership, and a small ceasefire instead of forced body love.
I discuss:
• the difference between rage at an abuser and rage at your body
• freeze response as a survival mechanism rather than consent
• physical arousal during assault as reflex and non-concordance
• dissociation as protection and what it can feel like
• chronic symptoms and illness as trauma living in the body
• medical system dismissal and the rage of self-advocacy
• body size changes as subconscious protection and visibility triggers
• intimacy challenges, stepping back from sex, and bodily sovereignty
• why safety in the body matters more than body positivity
• listening to symptoms as communication rather than accusation
Work With Me Individually
I offer trauma-informed therapy for high-achieving women navigating:
• Complex trauma
• Late-diagnosed ADHD or autism
• Nervous system dysregulation
• Relational pattern healing
If you’d prefer one-on-one support, book a free 15-minute consultation here:
http://linktr.ee/EmpoweringWellnessHub
Good Music for Healing
🎵 **Divine Woman Playlist (Apple Music):** https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/divine-woman/pl.u-leyl096uMoD885j
Episodes Mentioned in this Episode
Your Anger Is Proof You Are Healing
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/19243365-your-anger-is-proof-you-are-healing
BONUS EPI: Honoring Sacred Rage
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/19259486-bonus-epi-honoring-sacred-rage
You’re not alone.
We’re healing together.
Welcome To The Rage Arc
Hello, hello. Welcome to the Awaken Heart, a podcast for healing women. I'm Autumn Ran, your host, licensed professional counselor, yoga instructor, life coach. Ultimately I'm a neurodivergent trauma experienced woman here to share all I know, all I've experienced, all the knowledge I can give you in this sacred path we call healing. And right now we're in the rage arc, the rage season, if you will, of season two healing from sexual trauma. And if you've been with me since the Sacred Rage episode, you know we've done some hard work. We named the rage, we gave it permission, we talked about where it comes from and what to do with it. If you haven't listened to those episodes, I will link them in the show notes so that you can go back and get some knowledge. But today we're going to go somewhere a little harder. We're going to talk about the rage that doesn't have a clean external target, the rage that isn't pointed at your abuser or the people who failed you or the systems that let you down. It's all about the rage that's pointed inward at your own body. Maybe the body that froze when you needed it to fight. Maybe the body that didn't scream. Maybe your body responded in ways that still confuse you, that you've spent years trying to make sense of, or you've tried not to think about it at all, just to let it go, get over it. This is a lot to brace for, right? You don't have to be at peace with your body to be healing. You're allowed to be in a hard, complicated, ongoing relationship with your body. You're allowed to be angry at it. You're allowed to be frustrated by it. You're allowed to be in a season where gratitude and rage are sitting right next to each other. And neither one of them is going to cancel out the other. And I speak from personal experience. Right now, my body is the biggest it's ever been. I am dealing with gut issues and hormonal chaos that medical doctors have not been able to adequately adequate adequately express or address, excuse me, not express, but address. Getting some help, more to come from that, but like I'm in the midst of my own research, making my own decisions and also hoping for the best based on my research, because I've had such a difficult time in the medical field. So to put it simply, my relationship with my body is not simple. I love my body, I'm grateful for my body, but I am also frustrated, uncomfortable, and sometimes really furious at how it's not working out. So both things are true and they don't cancel each other out. I love my body, I talk positively to my body, but I also get frustrated. So if you're coming into this episode not from a place of body peace, but from a place of body war, you're in the right place. This is for you. Let's
When Rage Turns Inward
begin. Let's get into it, right? What the body did and why is what I want to start with. During trauma, during sexual trauma, your body responded. And the way it responded might be one of the things you carried the most shame about, or at least some shame about. So I want to name the responses directly because they need to be spoken out loud. It froze, right? Your body froze. It didn't fight, it didn't run, it went still, it went quiet, it went somewhere else and didn't do the thing you think it should have done. And maybe you've asked yourself a thousand times, why didn't I fight back? Why didn't I scream? Why didn't I run? The honest answer is because your nervous system made a calculation in real time. It assessed the threat, it assessed your options, and it determined that fighting or fleeing was not survivable or was more dangerous than going still. The freeze response is not a character flaw. It is not cowardice, it is not consent. It is one of the most ancient, most hardwired survival mechanisms your nervous system has. Animals freeze when caught by predators. Your body did the same thing. The freeze essentially saved you. And I know that's hard to hear. I know it doesn't feel that way, but your nervous system was doing exactly what it was built to do. Or maybe your body responded with physical arousal. And this can carry a lot of shame, maybe some of the most shame. Some of you experience physical arousal during assault, and you've carried that as the most devastating secret, the one that you've used as evidence that some part of you wanted it, that it wasn't really assault, that you're broken or disgusting, or you're complicit. And I want to say this out loud, very high on the mountaintop, standing at my podium, banging my feet, banging my hands. Physical arousal during assault is a physiological reflex. It is not desire, it is not consent, and it does not mean that any part of you wanted it. The body responds to physical stimulation the way the body does. That's what the body does. It doesn't require the brain's permission, it doesn't require safety or desire or willingness. Stimulation produces response. That is biology. That is never, was never, will never be your fault. This is documented. This is real. Researchers have a name for this. It's called non-concordance, the gap between physical response and psychological desire. Your body responding was not your body betraying you, it was your body running its default programming in a situation where it had no other options. You are not complicit. What happened to you was and is still assault, full stop. What happens if you dissociated? Your body, your mind just left.
Freeze Response And Self Blame
It went somewhere else. You checked out. Maybe you remember watching from the ceiling. Maybe you don't remember at all. Maybe you went completely numb and couldn't feel anything. Dissociation is the nervous system's most sophisticated protection. When what's happening is too overwhelming to be processed in real time, the system moves you out of it. This is not weakness, nor is it dysfunction. It is an extraordinary act of protection. And dissociation can look and feel different. It might look like spacing out, losing chunks of time, not being able to locate yourself in your own body, feeling like you're moving through cotton. I mean, these experiences often went unnamed and unrecognized because the people around us didn't know what they were looking at. Dissociation doesn't make you crazy, nor does it mean you're being dramatic. Your nervous system was doing everything it could to protect you, to keep you alive. What if your body got sick after the trauma? Sometimes immediately, sometimes years later, your body got sick. Chronic pain, digestive issues, autoimmune conditions, hormonal disruptions, sleep disorders. Trauma lives in the body. It doesn't just exist in memory and narrative, it encodes in the tissue, the nervous system, the gut, the hormones. The body carries what the mind can't fully process. And then you're angry at the body for being sick, for not cooperating, for costing you energy and money and doctor's appointments and research and decisions you shouldn't have to make alone. Oh, sounds like I'm speaking up myself. Am I calling myself out in my own episode? Gut issues, hormone issues, history of trauma. Is this years later chronic pain coming up because of trauma that's been held in the body? Hmm. Interesting, calling myself out. But the anger is real and it makes complete sense, right? The anger at the body is real. But also, this isn't your body failing. This is your body showing up where it's like it's like showing you where it still needs to be tended, right? So my body's saying, Okay, Autumn, you've you've healed, you've grown, you've raged, you're in the midst of trying at the rebirth arc, but there's still some things that need to be tended to. I'm listening. And the answer for this week, as I'm listening to my body, hearing my body say there's healing, I have planned a whole week of yoga. Some power, some strength, some gentle, some long, some short. I even scheduled a yoga nidra session for Saturday night. So before bedtime, I'm gonna do an hour-long yoga nidra. So I say all this to say it's just like giving you examples. Like I'm not going to a retreat, I'm not going to pay for a bunch of classes. I have an app. If you're a veteran, and I don't even think it's for just veterans, but it is geared toward veterans. It's called, gosh, let me look on my screen, Veterans Yoga Project. And it is really wonderful. They have live classes that run all day, every day, early in the morning to well into the night, and all kinds of yoga classes, and it's all free. They have raffle tickets of like there's a raffle going right now to have a week's vacation in Costa Rica with one of the instructors at a retreat. So it's a nonprofit. So like you can just buy raffle tickets and that donates to the nonprofit. And you don't have to do any of that. You don't ever have to turn your video on, you don't ever have to turn your microphone on. Like you can just show up, be in a chair, be on a mat, or stand up. It's really just all levels welcome. But I use that platform to plan something for my body this week, despite the fact that I feel like me and my body are at war sometimes. I'm listening to my body saying, hey, we need some tending, and I'm trying to tend to it. What if your body changed? It got bigger or smaller. I read a read a study one time, I don't remember where it was. It was between undergrad and graduate school, but survivors
Arousal During Assault Explained
of sexual trauma or abuse tend to either gain weight, because in in the subconscious realm, it keeps you safe. You're not a target. People tend to look at you differently when you're a heavier body person sometimes, depending on what part of the world you live in. Our clothes get bigger, wear baggier clothes. Are smaller, where you want to make yourself as small as possible. The smallest you can get, so no one will see you, touch you, take advantage of you, hurt you. Either way, bigger or smaller, maybe your body has become unfamiliar. It stopped feeling like your body. It became a place you didn't want to inhabit. Sometimes the body changes as direct protection, getting bigger or smaller as a way of becoming less visible, less targeted, less desirable in environments where being desired felt dangerous. This isn't always conscious, like I said. This is a subconscious thing. The body is incredibly intelligent and it will do what it needs to do to keep you safe. And sometimes that means getting bigger or smaller. And sometimes the body changes. I'm going to take a sip. So if you hear my water bottle opening, that's what I'm doing. But sometimes the body changes because of physiological aftermath, cortisol dysregulation, hormonal shifts, metabolic changes, medication effects. And sometimes, which I just said a few minutes ago about my own body, but sometimes you're living in a body that just feels like it's working against you. And maybe also the medical system isn't helping. Maybe you're researching everything yourself and doing your best, and that's exhausting. That is a valid and devastating place to be, and you're allowed to be angry about that. But it's not like this rage just lives in the past. It's not only what happened during the trauma, it's about what's happening right now because your body is still here. You're still living it and living in it, and the relationship is ongoing and complicated and sometimes exhausted, exhausting. You're doing everything you're supposed to do, right? Maybe you're trying to eat well, maybe you're trying to move your body, you're working on sleep, and your body still isn't responding the way you want it to. And I I I've noted the medical system a couple of times. Because I don't know if this is a shared experience, but it feels dismissive. Being told that my symptoms are just anxiety, or that they're nothing to be concerned with, lab results that come back quote unquote normal when I know I feel anything but normal. Doctors who don't actually fucking listen. Are the having to educate your own provider to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're experiencing what you're experiencing? It's stupid. This is a specific kind of rage that comes from being your own medical advocate in a system that's just simply not built to serve me. And that that rage is completely legitimate. And when your body's changed, maybe it's become more visible, more present, harder to hide. And for women who experience sexual trauma, visibility can feel like a threat. Taking up space can feel very dangerous. Having a body that gets looked at can trigger all the old nervous system responses. So if you have rage at your body's visibility, it's sometimes really rage at a world that wasn't safe enough for you to exist in a body without being without it being a problem. Right? It's just rage at the systems, not at your body, really. And for those of you who are still navigating sexual intimacy because life goes on and you try
Dissociation As Protection
to get into a relationship, you try to move past. Maybe your body flinches, maybe you dissociate. Maybe you can't access pleasure the way you used to, the way you want to. Maybe you just go through the motions while you're somewhere else. Maybe you have rage at not being able to be present in your own body during intimacy. That anger is real. That can be frustrating. That you want to be moved on. You want to be intimate with the person you're with despite what has happened to you, because they are not them, right? And for those of you who, like myself, have made the decision to step back from sexual intimacy entirely, there's a complexity to that. Complexity to loving that decision, feeling safe in that decision, and also like sometimes grieving that decision. I mean, the fucking anger at needing to make that choice at all. Because my own I don't even want to say reclaiming to my body. I want to say claiming my body for the first time started when I decided to stop having sex. I needed to feel safe in my body with myself by myself before anyone else was allowed to be intimate with it. That was an act of sovereignty for me, not avoidance, not damage, but truly showing up for myself and doing what I know I needed to do to feel safe in my body without someone else's touch. And I've been in that choice for years now, and I don't regret it. I recommend it to anyone because the longer you go without sex, the more your threshold for bullshit is there, for is not there. Like you can't take bullshit. Like I will not, I now will not let just any old body in my life. I will not give someone the benefit of the doubt. I will take what I see and I will use that information, not what I hope they'd be. Because I worked so hard on my piece. I'm just not letting that get messed up ever again. But I'm naming it because I think a lot of women make this choice and feel ashamed of it. And you feel like you're broken or feel like you should be further along. You're not broken. These are all choices that help you protect yourself. It is an act of self-love to work on your body responses. It is an act of self-love to get safe in your body and have only safe touch happen to you on your terms. I mean, let's talk about permission to be angry at your body. In a culture where we currently are living, where the message is anything but love your body.
Illness And Symptoms After Trauma
It's heroin chic, right? It's as skinny as possible. It's look as malnourished as possible to be hot and sexy again. It's just please be angry at that. I'm not knocking anybody for weight loss drugs. I'd give to two two shits. Please lose weight if you don't feel comfortable. But like skin and bones below the recommended weight, please don't push that, Hollywood, Hollyweird. Please don't push that. There's too many. It's too much. It's too much. So you're already exhausted from performing okayness, from masking, from managing how you appear. And now there's this whole movement asking you to be this version of you that looks like everyone else. And that can be enraging. Because it's asking you to skip past the very real, very valid, very complicated feelings you're actually having about your body. It's just, let's take a pill, let's exercise, let's eat more protein. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. You're allowed to be angry at your body and love it at the same time. You're allowed to be deeply uncomfortable in your body right now and also deeply committed to its healing. That's an honest relationship you're having with your body. And that old love your body, positive body vibes, lands completely different when your body was the site of something being done to you or done to it without your consent. When your body was treated as an object, when your body's responses were used against you, you don't owe your body love on a timeline. You don't owe it performance. You owe your body honesty. And right now, honesty may look like, hey, I'm furious at you. I'm in pain. I don't feel at home here. And I'm going to, I'm not going to pretend that I do. That's honesty. And that is more healing than any forced affirmation, body positive affirmation someone's asking you to repeat. Because the culture script says, love your body first, start there, get the body love, and everything else will follow. But for trauma survivors, that's often the wrong starting place. It skips a step that isn't optional. And that Starting space, the real starting space that is not optional is safety. The first question isn't can I love this body? The first question is, can I be safe in this body? Can my body be a place where I'm not under constant threat, constant surveillance? Can I tolerate being present here inside this skin without it being an act of endurance? That's the foundation and the building it takes to do that takes time. It is not linear. So planing your body is not the same for everyone. It doesn't have a single script or a single timeline. For some, it starts with movement, finding one way, just one, to be in the body that doesn't feel like a threat. Walking, swimming, yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, bicycling, anything where the body is moving and you're present in it and it's okay. For some, it's to start with decisions about access. Who gets to be near this body, who gets to touch this body, and what is and isn't allowed for this body.
Tending The Body With Yoga
Taking back the authority over who enters your space is sometimes where it starts. For some, it starts with learning, reading about the freeze response, understanding what happened neurologically, finally having a framework that explains what your body did and why. Knowledge as the beginning of compassion is sometimes where it starts. And for some, it starts with the decision to stop fighting a particular battle, getting off the diet cycle, stopping the project of fixing the body, and just letting it exist for a while without an improvement agenda. But the thing that all of these have in common is that they start with the question of what does my body need from me right now? Not what I do I need to do to my body. That shift from doing to listening, that's where reclamation begins. My decision that my blaba my belong blah blah blah blah blah blah. My decision that my body belonged to me first before anyone else had access, that was my claiming of my body. It's not the same as love. It's something more foundational than love. It's ownership. It's this is mine, this belongs to me, and I decide what happens here. And love can come from that, but it doesn't have to come immediately, and it doesn't have to look like what the body positivity movement is selling. Sometimes love looks like I'm still here, I'm still trying, I'm still showing up for this body, even when it's hard, and that is enough. So I don't want to necessarily give you a to-do list. I'm not going to give you so many steps, five steps to body healing, because that's not what this is. This is more of like a reorientation, a change in direction, a slightly different way of re approaching the relationship. Your body has been carrying things without being acknowledged, without being thinked, without being seen. One of the most profound things you can do is simply witness what's what your body's been through. Not to fix it, not to improve it, not to change it, but just to witness it. It carried you through something it shouldn't have had to carry. It protected you the best way it knew how. It's still here, it's still working. Even when the working feels like malfunction, it's still trying. Your machine is still working for you. That deserves to be acknowledged. And most of us are running a brutal internal monologue about our bodies, constant, critical, the voice that narrates every mirror, every piece of clothing, every meal, every symptom. That voice learned to talk that way. It was trained and it can be retrained, not into force positivity, but into something less like war. So it's not like my body is beautiful, I love my body. It's more like my body is doing the best it can. My body has been through a lot, my body is not my enemy. A small ceasefire. That's the beginning. And the shift
Body Changes And Visibility Triggers
from why won't my body cooperate to what is my body trying to tell me is very significant. Symptoms, discomfort, illness, resistance, this is all communication. This is your body speaking. It doesn't mean you have to like what it's saying. It doesn't mean the symptoms aren't real and hard and costly. It just means orienting toward them with a little more curiosity and a little less accusation. Sensory needs are body needs. Regulation needs are body needs. The need for certain textures, temperatures, sounds, these are not preferences, nor are they indulgences. These are your nervous system's way of communicating what it needs in order to function. Honoring those needs is not weakness. It is not being difficult. It is treating your nervous system with the respect it deserves after everything it's been through. Ultimately, your body did not betray you. It responded physolog physiologically in ways that were not consent. It dissociated to protect you. It got sick because it was carrying something too heavy. It changed because it was trying to keep you safe. And right now it might be in a hard season. You might be uncomfortable. You might be frustrated in ways that feel relentless. You might be doing everything right and still not getting the results you're looking for. That does not mean your body is failing you. That means you are in a hard season together. You're allowed to be angry. You're allowed to be in this complicated, nonlinear, sometimes very painful relationship with your body. That's not failure. That's just an honest beginning of something real, a real relationship with yourself. The bonus episode this week that comes out Friday is going to go deeper into the actual techniques. I'm going to talk about somatic work, IFS, parts work, DBT, dialectical behavior therapy, CPT, cognitive processing therapy tools, mindfulness practices specifically designed for body-based trauma. If you're ready to go further, it will be here on Friday. Like I said earlier at the beginning, if you're new to the season two, Healing from Sexual Trauma, if I can make it all fit, I'll have the episodes from the beginning of the season up until now for you to go back and check. If that turns out to be too long in when I'm editing, I will just put in the ones of the rage arc that we've gone through so far. Just so you can be familiar with the rage arc and the permission to be angry. If you want to work with me, if you want to listen to some good music, a playlist that has good positive music, I think I have a still some a few freebies, some ADHD freebie and a breath work freebie, any of that stuff. My link is in the show notes. You can read all about it in the show notes. Reach out to me if you want to work one-on-one or if you have any questions. If you like what you hear, if you have a friend, if you know a woman that may benefit from this, please share. I am not on social media. I am not marketing. I am just going word of mouth, trying to share my story and my experience. So if you would share, if you would thumbs up it or like it to help me share this message to more women that need to hear it, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. I would thank you deeply. I thank
Intimacy After Trauma And Sovereignty
you deeply in advance. So yeah, I'm here every Monday. No, I was about to say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but that's not true. I'm here every Wednesday and every Friday. Wednesday's episodes are the main episode of the week. Friday's episode is a bonus to kind of just build onto that week's main episode and provide more in-depth coping skills and strategies for you to move forward in your healing. All right, my dears. Thank you so much for being here. Until next time, be as gentle as you can with yourself. Be as gentle as you can with your awakened heart. And take the gentlest possible care of a body that's been through too much. See you soon.
