Our Story
The AHA Puzzle
Like putting together a jigsaw puzzle of an unknown picture, Tom began connecting the pieces that would become AHA; a way to normalize the stress and trauma through homeostasis he had personally experienced as a child as well as those he was treating professionally as a psychotherapist since 1994.
As a psychotherapist Tom has primarily treated clients experiencing the impact of chronic stress and trauma. He worked in forensic psychotherapy treating sexual offenders for nearly 20 years.
Tom found understanding the neurobiology of stress and trauma with its impact on maladaptive coping and dysregulated emotions essential to his work in forensic psychotherapy. As he approached the limit of ways to improve these impacts through psychotherapy, including clients taking psychotropic medications, he began to understand not only the underlying neuroscience of stress and trauma, but also considered how homeostasis might be activated.
Numerous sources gave him clues about homeostasis, particularly Walter Cannon's, The Wisdom of the Body. The puzzle pieces fitted together but the picture remained elusive. With a history of personal trauma beginning in childhood including fainting episodes under extreme stress, it was his own experience of homeostatic mechanisms during an episode of neurocardiogenic syncope that triggered his own “aha moment.”
This was one of the final pieces to the puzzle of how to allow the brain to normalize stress and trauma. Coming out of anesthesia after medical testing that had commonalities with childhood trauma his body began to convulse with clonic and myoclonic nonepiletic seizure activity which he became increasingly aware of and observed. Tom recognized the involuntary somatic activity as restorative and a function of the sympathetic nervous system ‘flight or fight’ transitioning into the parasympathetic nervous system ‘relax and recover’ function rather than an indication of a lack of health.
The final puzzle piece completing the AHA picture was understanding that his awareness of the homeostatic activity as a sensory experience of interoception allowed the involuntary normalizing activity to continue. Tom discovered that through a combination of activation of homeostasis in the enteric nervous system while maintaining an interoceptive sensory awareness the process of homeostasis could be initiated and maintained to a state of homeostasis. Tom developed the Autonomic Healing Activation protocol through trial and error in 2014.