Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J’aime Rothbard.

Are we approaching trauma work upside-down?

For years, Steven Hoskinson followed conventional psychotherapeutic wisdom by making a person’s distress and difficulties the focus of his sessions.

But there came a point where he realised there was a better way.

By guiding people to notice cues of orientation, enjoyment, pleasure and wellness, Steven discovered that he could help them to activate their capacity for self-healing.

This insight led to the development of Organic Intelligence (OI™), an increasingly popular therapeutic modality employed by thousands of practitioners around the world. 

In this episode, Steven and Matthew explore the essence of Steven’s approach and how it’s contributing to the broader trauma healing movement. Grounded in the awareness of our sense-experience  — or orientation — and recognition of a clients’ latent resources, OI recognises how innate wholeness emerges in what Steven calls Post-Trauma Growth. 

“Our attention has been therapeutically directed toward what the problem is, what the conflict is, what the unconscious dysregulation is,” Steven says. “And it is all negatively valenced: It’s all about the problem, the challenge, the neurosis, the difficulty that’s there. The discovery that I’ve made after being an orthodox therapist and a somatic trainer in trauma therapy is that that is not the preferred biological method. Instead, we are growing capacity or growing the cup.”

Rather than exclusively focus on the negative emotions, which amplifies the human “negativity bias”, Organic Intelligence activates the mind-body system’s natural impulse to restore and rebalance after trauma. This is achieved by supporting people’s awareness of sense-connections and the ‘window of enjoyment’ – the daily experience of simple human pleasures in the here-and-now, despite the pain from the past. 

“We train to recognize our self-healing capacities, and our coaches identify those for their clients,” Steven says. “They reflect those back to the clients in a specifically attuned way that then simply does the work.” 

By providing an accessible introduction to Organic Intelligence, and the journey of discovery that has informed Steven’s work, this episode aims to inspire anyone interested in learning more about how committed practitioners are evolving new ways to heal humanity’s oldest wounds. 

“What does it mean to entirely revamp the idea of what trauma healing might really be?” Steven asks. “And how do we begin to implement this on a broader scale?”

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Further Resources:

Organic Intelligence

About Steven Hoskinson: 

Steven Hoskinson is an internationally recognized teacher, author, and innovator in Post-Trauma Growth (PTG). For over 20 years, he has been a presenter and professional trainer on the global stage, empowering thousands in response to large-scale societal needs. Steve’s work at Organic Intelligence^® has included teaching as Adjunct Faculty for JFK School of Psychology, Advisory Board Member for The Trauma Foundation, and a founding member of the International Transformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC) National Steering Committee. He has been featured in Dr. Mark Hyman’s “Broken Brain” docu-series, the 2019 Plum Village Neuroscience Retreat in France and has provided numerous professional conference presentations and keynote addresses. As Director of Education, he has developed the science-backed OI Trajectory™ professional training programs and continuing education in Post-Trauma Growth.