Tyranny does not begin with tanks or laws. It begins with denouncement— it is a political weapon.

In this episode of Exiled and Rising, Ana Mael examines how patriarchy and tyranny use denouncement to silence truth, exile dissenters, and maintain control. Drawing from somatic trauma therapy, political psychology, and global protest movements in the United States and Iran, Ana explores how survivors, whistleblowers, women, and marginalized voices are cast out not for causing harm, but for naming it.

This episode connects personal exile to systemic oppression, showing how family silencing, spiritual bypassing, and emotional shaming prepare people for authoritarian compliance on a national scale. Ana breaks down how denouncement impacts the nervous system, why speaking truth feels dangerous in the body, and why healing from exile is not only personal — but political, ancestral, and revolutionary.

If you have ever been labeled “too much,” punished for setting boundaries, shunned for telling the truth, or felt the somatic aftermath of being cast out, this episode offers language, validation, and a path back to embodied integrity.

Topics include: trauma and patriarchy, authoritarianism, protest and resistance, somatic healing, political trauma, internalized exile, spiritual abuse, and reclaiming voice after silencing.

What we are witnessing globally is not only a rise in authoritarian governments, but a normalization of the psychological conditions that make tyranny possible. Denouncement is one of its most efficient tools.

Here’s why this is urgent today:

Authoritarian power depends on people who no longer trust their own perception.

When individuals are repeatedly punished for naming harm—at home, in institutions, in communities—they learn a somatic lesson:
Truth is dangerous. Belonging requires silence.

By the time tyranny shows up at a national level, the body has already been trained to comply. Fear, freeze, fawn, and dissociation become survival strategies. A population in this state is easier to control than one that is regulated, connected, and embodied.

Denouncement conditions the nervous system to choose safety over truth.

Tyranny does not invent new tactics. It scales familiar ones.

• Families that scapegoat truth-tellers

• Spiritual communities that exile dissenters

• Workplaces that punish whistleblowers

• Cultures that label protest as “divisive”

These are micro-rehearsals for authoritarianism.

When people are taught early that naming abuse makes them the problem, they are more likely to accept state narratives that criminalize protest, suppress journalists, or frame resistance as chaos.

This is how private trauma becomes public compliance.

In healthy societies, power is challenged through dialogue.
In tyrannical ones, power avoids conversation and moves directly to discrediting.

We see this everywhere today:

• Protesters framed as threats rather than citizens

• Women labeled hysterical, radical, or dangerous for bodily autonomy

• Activists called destabilizing instead of ethical

• Truth-tellers accused of spreading disorder

Denouncement short-circuits thinking.
It removes nuance.
It creates fear of association.

Once denouncement becomes normal, people self-censor. Tyranny no longer needs to silence everyone—people silence themselves.

This is the part many miss.

For...

• (00:00:00) - How Denouncement Chains Patriarchy and Tyranny
• (00:12:14) - Coming back to yourself
• (00:16:40) - Behold, the Defiant

1. Wasteland speaks to the seasons of life when everything falls apart.In this episode of Exiled & Rising, somatic therapist Ana Mael reads her new poem “Wasteland,” a raw and powerful exploration of collapse, service burnout, and the sacred liminal space between breaking down and rising again.

Wasteland speaks to the seasons of life when everything falls apart:
when we are exhausted from serving others,
when our nervous system can no longer perform strength,
and when the body pulls us into the in-between — not drowning anymore, but not yet able to rise.

Ana reflects on:

• Somatic collapse and how the body enters freeze, exhaustion, and resignation

• The wasteland as an inner landscape of burnout, heartbreak, and depletion

• How trauma and over-functioning create spiritual and emotional exile

• The role of mud as metaphor for the freeze state, collapse, and nervous system protection

• Why the in-between is a sacred threshold in trauma recovery

• How grief, rest, and slowing down create the conditions for rebirth

• Feminine exhaustion caused by caretaking, endurance, emotional labor, and patriarchal conditioning

• Returning to the self after years of serving, bending, complying, and disappearing

Ana invites listeners into a new understanding of trauma healing:
that collapse is not a failure,
rest is not resignation,
and the in-between is not a void —
it is gestation, the place where the nervous system prepares for emergence.

If you are in a season of exhaustion, stuckness, or resignation…
If you feel like you are hip-deep in the mud of your own life…
If you are mourning the years you spent rising for others and resigning yourself…
This episode is for you.

You do not have to rush your rebirth.
You are allowed to rest beside the mud.
You are allowed to mourn the wasteland of your life.

For deeper work with Ana, explore her somatic teachings on:

• Trauma recovery & nervous system healing

• Resignation Syndrome

• Emotional exhaustion & burnout

• Rebuilding self-worth after collapse

• Feminine embodiment & ancestral trauma patterns

• Returning to your body after emotional exile

ANA TEACHINGS & PROGRAMS

https://exiledandrising.mykajabi.com/store

RESIGNATION SYNDROME RECOVERY

https://exiledandrising.mykajabi.com/offers/SSApP35o/checkout

Get the Book: The Trauma We Don't Talk About https://amzn.to/41SjKKL

❤️ Please donate

This podcast is independently run. No production teams. Fancy edits. Only a somatic therapy education, truth & storytelling.

https://donate.stripe.com/3cI9AS5Xfb9W6O832VfEk00

Somatic Trauma Recovery Center

https://www.somatictraumarecoverycenter.com/

About Ana Mael:

Ana Mael is a genocide survivor, somatic therapist, and author of The Trauma We Don’t Talk About. She is the founder of the Somatic Trauma Recovery Center and has dedicated her career to helping survivors reclaim their identity, dignity, and self-trust.

With decades of lived experience, Ana offers...

The Body Is Where God Speaks. In this episode of Exiled & Rising, Ana Mael — somatic experiencing therapist for trauma recovery and ancestral healing — explores what it truly means to decolonize prayer.

For centuries, prayer was shaped by systems of domination — religions that demanded obedience, erased Indigenous and ancestral practices, and taught that the Divine could only be reached through worthiness or submission.
To decolonize prayer is to reclaim it: to bring the sacred back into the body, the land, and the breath.

Ana guides listeners through a gentle reflection on how prayer can become an act of embodied liberation rather than control. She explores how trauma, faith, and colonial conditioning often intertwine — and how we can begin to pray not from fear, but from belonging.

In this episode, you’ll discover how to:

• Reclaim prayer as a living, breathing dialogue with the Divine.

• Restore your relationship with your body, ancestors, and earth as sacred sources of guidance.

• Recognize and release the inherited beliefs that say you must be “pure” or “worthy” to be loved.

• Learn how somatic healing and spirituality can merge into a prayer practice rooted in justice, tenderness, and autonomy.

Ana teaches that to decolonize prayer is to return to intimacy with life itself — to remember that divinity was never outside of you. It’s within your heartbeat, your lineage, your breath.

“The body is not an obstacle to God — it is where God speaks.”

• (00:00:01) - What Decolonizing Prayer Means
• (00:13:28) - Decolonizing Prayer for the Soul

De-theologizing shame by making God intimate and embodied.

This prayer is a profound embodiment of Ana’s entire body of work — it’s not simply spiritual language; it’s somatic invocation.

Ana is weaving together the language of prayer with the language of the body.
When she says:

“Move through me, speak through me, walk through me, heal through me,”
she’s not appealing to an abstract deity. She’s inviting the sacred to inhabit the body — to let divine presence become movement, breath, and nervous system regulation.

This is somatic theology — healing not through escape from the body, but through returning to it as a vessel for grace.

Her repeated invocations — “Let me lean on you… Let me be held by you… supported by you…” — are re-parenting moments.
In trauma, safety is broken; the body learns it must hold itself alone.
Through prayer, Ana restores the felt sense of being held, not only psychologically but spiritually.

She is offering a reparative experience — one in which Divine Spirit becomes a co-regulator.

Instead of fighting darkness, Ana models surrender as sacred collaboration.
Each line — “rest in me… live in my bones… dance in my heart…” — turns despair into dialogue.
She’s teaching that you don’t heal by forcing light but by allowing what is divine, ancestral, and alive to move through you even when you feel broken.

This is how trauma becomes transmuted into devotion — not bypassed, but inhabited with grace.

By naming Beloved Ancestors, she opens intergenerational space:
Healing isn’t solitary; it’s ancestral repair.
She invites listeners to feel lineage behind them — support that trauma often erases.
In Ana’s language, ancestors aren’t abstract; they are part of the nervous system memory — the strength behind your spine, “standing behind my back when I falter.”

The repetition — move through me, walk through me, rest in me — mirrors the natural rhythm of the body’s regulation cycle: expansion, contraction, rest.
Listeners experience calm not through religious belief, but through entrainment — the nervous system settles into the rhythm of Ana’s voice.

She’s teaching that prayer can be a nervous system practice, not just a spiritual one.

In essence, Ana is:

• De-theologizing shame by making God intimate and embodied.

• Decolonizing prayer by rooting it in the self and the an...

• (00:00:01) - Living With My Beloved Ancestors

In this episode of Exiled & Rising, Ana offers a Winter Solstice teaching on withdrawal — not as avoidance, pathology, or failure, but as a biological and nervous-system necessity.

For most of human history, withdrawal was respected.
People retreated in winter, in grief, in illness, and in times of transition.
Reduced contact, reduced visibility, and solitude were understood as forms of regulation and protection.

In modern culture, withdrawal is often misunderstood and condemned.
It is labeled depression, disengagement, lack of resilience, or a personal problem to be fixed.
This episode challenges that narrative.

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ANA TEACHINGS & PROGRAMS

https://exiledandrising.mykajabi.com/store

RESIGNATION SYNDROME RECOVERY

https://exiledandrising.mykajabi.com/offers/SSApP35o/checkout

Get the Book: The Trauma We Don't Talk About https://amzn.to/41SjKKL

❤️ Please donate

This podcast is independently run. No production teams. Fancy edits. Only a somatic therapy education, truth & storytelling.

https://donate.stripe.com/3cI9AS5Xfb9W6O832VfEk00

Somatic Trauma Recovery Center

https://www.somatictraumarecoverycenter.com/

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Ana explores:

• Why withdrawal is essential for nervous system regulation

• How the body signals the need to retract through exhaustion, slowness, and loss of outward motivation

• The difference between withdrawal and isolation

• Why constant availability and visibility overwhelm the nervous system

• How Winter Solstice marks a natural psychological and biological hinge

• Why meaning, clarity, and forward movement cannot be forced during collapse

• How solitude protects what is still forming beneath the surface

This teaching is for those who feel tired, flattened, less responsive, or uninterested in performing productivity or growth.
It is not an episode about self-improvement or resilience.
It is an orientation toward rest, regulation, and permission.

Winter Solstice reminds us that nothing essential grows in exposure.
Growth begins in darkness, quiet, and reduced demand — long before it reaches the light.

This episode invites listeners to:

• Reduce contact

• Simplify language

• Let plans go quiet

• Stop trying to be understood

• Stay close to what regulates the body and nervous system

The light will return on its own.
Withdrawal is not something to overcome — it is something to respect.

• (00:00:00) - Winter Solstice: The Need for Self-Exposure
• (00:13:16) - A moment of solitude for yourself
• (00:15:04) - Winter Solstice: A Season of Stillness

She Stopped Shrinking. They Called Her a Bitch. Ana Mael explores how patriarchal conditioning has shaped generations of women to silence their power, shrink their brilliance, and confuse survival with love. In this episode, somatic therapist and writer Ana Mael traces the evolution of feminine suppression—from the witch hunts that burned women for their wisdom, to the modern emotional burn of being called too much, too emotional, or a bitch.

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ANA TEACHINGS & PROGRAMS

https://exiledandrising.mykajabi.com/store

Get the Book: The Trauma We Don't Talk About https://amzn.to/41SjKKL

❤️ Please donate

This podcast is independently run. No production teams. Fancy edits. Only a somatic therapy education, truth & storytelling.

https://donate.stripe.com/3cI9AS5Xfb9W6O832VfEk00

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Ana unpacks the psychological, somatic, and relational impact of patriarchal dominance—how men are taught to equate worth with control, and how women internalize safety through self-erasure. Through raw storytelling and embodied teaching, she reveals what happens in the male psyche when faced with female expression, and what shrinking does to a woman’s nervous system, identity, and development.

This is a call to remember the ancestral power of the Witch, to break the inherited obedience of the Shrunk Woman, and to reclaim the unapologetic voice once branded as the Bitch.
If you’ve ever softened your truth to protect someone else’s ego, this episode will remind you that your expansion is not a threat—it’s a medicine.

She’s called a “bitch” not because she’s shrinking — but because she stopped shrinking.

Patriarchy teaches women that their safety, love, and social acceptance depend on self-minimization:

• Be agreeable, not assertive.

• Be supportive, not ambitious.

• Be emotional, but never angry.

• Be strong, but never stronger than him.

When a woman starts breaking those rules — speaking directly, naming the truth, setting boundaries, or owning her intelligence — she violates her conditioning.

And patriarchy, unable to control her anymore, shifts from reward to punishment.

So the word “bitch” becomes a disciplinary label — a form of social policing.
It’s how society punishes women who expand beyond their prescribed size.

• The Witch → a woman whose power was seen as dangerous and supernatural; she was destroyed for it.

• The Shrunk Woman → a woman who learned to stay small to survive; she internalized the fear.

• The “Bitch” → a woman who refuses to shrink anymore; she survives the system but gets punished verbally instead of physically.

So the evolution goes like this:

Witch — punished by fire.
Shrunk — punished by silence.
️ “Bitch” — punished by language.

Each phase represents a different survival strategy within...

• (00:00:00) - Don't Shrink
• (00:11:11) - What Shrinking the Body Does to the Woman's Psyche
• (00:18:07) - The Cost of Self-Abortion
• (00:30:03) - Rising Anna

What does that mean? Resilience says: you got through it, amazing, keep going.

• Accountability says: you shouldn’t have had to “get through it” like that in the first place.

Resilience puts the work on the survivor.
Accountability puts the work on the relationship / family / community / system.

So when people call you strong and stop there, they are choosing resilience over accountability. They’re saying, “Your capacity is the solution,” instead of, “Our repair is the solution.”

IT MEANS: Please keep performing resilience so I can keep avoiding accountability.

That’s why Ana keeps saying:
“You don’t have to heal alone.”
Because being the strong one is healing alone. It’s the glorified version of healing alone.

______________________________________

ANA TEACHINGS & PROGRAMS

https://exiledandrising.mykajabi.com/store

Get the Book: The Trauma We Don't Talk About https://amzn.to/41SjKKL

❤️ Please donate

This podcast is independently run. No production teams. Fancy edits. Only a somatic therapy education, truth & storytelling.

https://donate.stripe.com/3cI9AS5Xfb9W6O832VfEk00

_______________________________________

Resilience has been over-celebrated.
Accountability has been ignored.

Resilience says: You got through it. Amazing.
Accountability says: You shouldn’t have had to get through it like that at all.

When people call you strong but never ask who failed you, they’re choosing resilience over repair.
They’re saying, “Your capacity is the solution,” instead of, “Our care is the solution.”

Ana Mael doesn’t just talk about trauma as psychology, but as an issue of ethics, human rights, and collective dignity. She talks about moral values, personal and collective rights, and why accountability is essential for healing and human dignity.

This episode continues Ana Mael’s exploration from Strength Is Not Consent.
If that first conversation exposed how the “strong one” label hides collective avoidance, this one asks the harder question:

What do we owe one another after harm has occurred?
And what does accountability look like — not as punishment, but as restoration of dignity and truth?

In this follow-up to Strength Is Not Consent, Ana Mael expands her critique of resilience culture by introducing a radical concept: healing as a moral and human rights issue.

Speaking as a Somatic Experiencing Therapist, war survivor, and moral thinker, Ana argues that resilience without accountability perpetuates injustice — both personally and collectively.

She examines how Western therapy often privatizes pain, turning survival into an individual performance, while ignoring the political, cultural, and ethical systems that caused it.
Through body-based reflection and social commentary, she explores how true healing requires moral recognition, repair, and the restoration of dignity.

This episode bridges psychology, philosophy, and human rights — asking listeners to rethink what justice means in the aftermath of harm.

“Resilience is surviva...

• (00:00:00) - A message for immigrants and refugees
• (00:00:59) - Your Right to Accountability
• (00:10:13) - Accountability is a Human Right

Ana Mael explores why trauma teaches us to stay silent, and how reclaiming your voice becomes the first act of healing.

What happens when your body believes that asking for help will hurt someone else?

In this episode of Exiled & Rising, somatic experiencing therapist Ana Mael unpacks one of the most devastating trauma responses — the fear of being a burden. She explores how childhood conditioning, shame, and nervous-system survival patterns teach us to stay quiet even when we’re drowning.

Ana explains the psychology behind silence: how trauma imprints the belief that expressing need equals danger, rejection, or punishment. This episode reveals why many survivors apologize for existing, why help-seeking feels unsafe, and how the nervous system learns to equate visibility with threat.

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ANA TEACHINGS & PROGRAMS

https://exiledandrising.mykajabi.com/store

FROM SILENCE TO VOICE: SOMATIC TEACHINGS:

https://exiledandrising.mykajabi.com/offers/KDmX3bhu/checkout

Get the Book: The Trauma We Don't Talk About https://amzn.to/41SjKKL

❤️ Please donate

This podcast is independently run. No production teams. Fancy edits. Only a somatic therapy education, truth & storytelling.

https://donate.stripe.com/3cI9AS5Xfb9W6O832VfEk00

Through Ana’s signature blend of somatic insight, poetic reflection, and trauma education, you’ll learn:

• Why trauma makes it hard to ask for help

• How the “fawn” and “freeze” responses silence the body’s voice

• The cost of chronic self-sufficiency and hyper-responsibility

• Somatic practices to rebuild safety in asking, breathing, and being seen

• How to shift from self-blame to self-compassion and co-regulation

If you’ve ever felt guilty for needing, or feared that your pain would inconvenience others, this episode is your invitation to reclaim your right to speak, to ask, and to exist without apology.

Topics Covered:

• Silence as a survival response

• The fear of disturbing others

• Internalized shame and self-attack

• Somatic understanding of “freeze” and “fawn”

• Reclaiming voice and relational safety

Mentioned Concepts:
Somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, trauma recovery, PTSD healing, emotional repression, help-seeking, shame, people-pleasing, fear of being a burden, co-regulation.

About Ana Mael

why Ana Mael’s voice feels so singular.

Her approach to storytelling, teaching, and education in trauma work stands apart because she fuses clinical precision, poetic embodiment, and moral awareness in a way that is rare — even within the field of somatic therapy.

What makes Ana’s approach different from other trauma educators and writers:

• Most trauma educators describe somatic principles — she enacts them.

• Her language is sensory, rhythmic, and bodily:

  “As thick as mo...

• (00:00:00) - Because I Am Drowning, I Will Remain Silent
• (00:01:07) - Excuse me, I Am Drowning but I Will Remain
• (00:04:36) - The burden of needing to live
• (00:16:48) - Second, the burden story
• (00:26:19) - Exiled and Rising: How to Talk About Shame