Chapter 1: Tangled Roots — Why This Book Matters for Your Practice (condensed version)
What if the most powerful healing tool you have isn’t a technique, but your presence?
In “Tangled Roots,” I open my story with unflinching honesty: growing up in war-torn Israel, the child of deeply traumatized parents, learning to survive through nightly beatings and the constant threat of annihilation—both from bombs overhead and violence at home.
But this chapter isn’t just memoir. It’s a map.
You’ll discover:
- How trauma lives in the body and nervous system across generations (my grandmother’s Holocaust trauma shaped my mother’s terror, which shaped how I learned to be in the world)
- Why hypervigilance and dissociation are adaptive survival strategies—and how recognizing them changes everything about treatment
- The paradox of trauma: the same experiences that wound us also develop capacities we need to heal
- How co-regulation begins: The kind and healthy capability of my therapist started to permeate into my old emotional wounds.
The Missing Piece in Modern Trauma Work
Most therapeutic approaches focus on techniques and protocols. What’s missing is the understanding that healing happens in relationship—specifically, through the co-regulation between practitioner and client. We usually tend to trust the experiences we had for the good or the bad. Not every relationships are healing. If we choose what is familiar we would experience the same type of relationship we desperately want to avoid creating a vicious cycle, healthy and reparative co- regulation would happen when one mentally healthy individual is emotionally holding the wounded one.
This book reveals how two nervous systems, meeting in deep, spacious, and kind presence to create the necessary conditions for transformation. Not through doing, but through being with what is.
When I could hear my father’s car arriving each evening, my heart would pound. My body knew danger before my mind could think. Decades later, in Bonnie’s therapy room, I learned that this same somatic awareness—when met with deep, attuned presence—could become the doorway to healing.
For Healing Practitioners:
Whether you work with trauma, stress, chronic pain, or the everyday suffering of being human, this chapter illuminates:
- How your own nervous system state affects your clients’ capacity to heal
- Why self-compassion for practitioners isn’t self-care—it’s essential to the work
- How deep listening creates neural pathways for change
- The experience of unconditional presence and and it’s true power for healing.
“Tangled Roots” sets the foundation for understanding that we cannot guide others through territory we haven’t explored ourselves. My journey from the beaten child in Israel to a trauma-trained practitioner reveals the transformational power of facing our wounds in relationship.
This is co-regulation at its essence: two people, fully present with what is arising, creating safety through nervous system attunement rather than technique.
If you’re ready to deepen your practice beyond protocols and discover what truly creates lasting change, this chapter—and this book—offers a missing piece in contemporary healing work.
As we roll out these condensed chapters, we will be hosting regular online conversations about this topic, CEU’s will be provided during the workshops (once we are approved.), and we are self publishing this book to be released in 2026. If you would like this book, please send an email and we will put you on the list for early release.
