🎙️The Ecological Collapse of Your Pleasure—and How to Rebuild It (Trophic Cascades- The Somatic Magic Hidden in Nature’s Most Powerful Chain Reaction)
What do wolves, rivers, and sex have in common?
In today’s episode, we explore the trophic cascade—a phenomenon from the wilds of Yellowstone National Park—and how it offers a powerful metaphor (and literal somatic strategy) for reviving your body’s natural capacity for pleasure.
If your body feels stuck, numb, or like it’s lost its desire, this episode is your invitation to stop forcing and start rewilding. You’ll learn how one gentle shift in your nervous system can ripple through your entire erotic ecosystem—no overhaul, fixing, or faking required.
🐺 In This Episode, We Cover:
What happens when pleasure collapses—and how to recognize it
The story of Yellowstone’s wolves and how it mirrors your erotic body
What a “trophic cascade” is and why it matters for your nervous system
The difference between somatic and cognitive healing (and why it matters)
How introducing “predator energy” can thaw numbness and awaken turn-on
A real client story: from shutdown to reawakened desire with a 5-minute daily touch ritual
Three ways to spark your own pleasure cascade—starting today
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The DSM-XXX
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Inside, you’ll find:
✦ Reframings of so-called “sexual dysfunctions” like pelvic pain, vaginismus, anorgasmia, through a trauma-informed, pleasure-centered lens
✦ Somatic context for things like low libido, pain, dissociation, and numbness
✦ Radical translations of what your body might actually be saying when it doesn’t follow the cultural script
✦ Alternatives to diagnosis culture that honor nervous system rhythms, safety, and truth over performance
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Full Transcript Here:
What if I told you that your body has the power to change completely just by making one small shift? What if right now you already have everything you need to feel more pleasure, more connection, and more desire, but your body is just waiting for the right conditions to make it happen? Okay. We tend to think of pleasure as something that comes and goes something random or fleeting, but the truth is pleasure.
Just like stress, just like tension is a pattern that your body either learns or forgets, and the good news your body's wired to change. Today we're gonna talk about a powerful concept from nature called a trophic cascade. A chain reaction that transforms entire ecosystems and how the same principle applies to your body, your pleasure, and your sex life.
Trophic. Cascades have always fascinated me. I. I was looking for a metaphor that was gonna explain to people how somatics works because when you're working in, within the field of somatics, it's really different than. Something like talk therapy or any kind of cognitive processing or coaching that you do, because when you experience something new in your body in a way that is digestible to your system, meaning you don't go into overwhelm and you don't go into collapse or freeze, you're just, you're able to stick with the experience the entire time.
So when you have a new experience. That's digestible that you can stay present with the whole time. This shows your body a new way of being that then you then find you are able to return to even in really challenging situations. So. Let's say we are working on nervous system regulation in a session, and we are talking about, um, like something that happened to you with your partner.
Maybe you, you two keep getting it into the same conversation, the same fight, and you're able to talk about it in a different way in therapy or outside of, um, those times. But when you get into the fight. Your body has the same reaction every single time. You find yourself blaming the other person, you find yourself distancing.
Shutting down, somatic has Somatic gives you the ability to change yourself on a system wide level. By giving you an experience of something different. And a really great way to understand how this works in the body is through trophic cascades, which are unnaturally, um, occurring phenomena in nature. So let me take you to a little place called the Yellowstone National Park.
So picture towering mountains, open planes, rivers cutting through valleys breathtakingly wild. For decades though something is off, the ecosystem is struggling. The river banks are eroding, vegetation's disappearing, and animal populations are out of balance. So why this? Why is because the wolves have been removed without wolves.
The elk and deer multiply. They grazed along the rivers for years, eating all the young saplings and plants that once held the land together. Over time the landscape. The landscape grew barren. The rivers themselves began to change course muddy and shallow. Without the stability of the plants to hold their banks, the ecosystem without its balance had begun to collapse.
So all of those stabilizing little plants that were growing on the banks of the river that keep the soil nice and solid and packed and steady. They were being munched on by all of these, um, all of these prey animals because the predator, the wolves were, um, removed. And so this starts to change the system entirely.
And this is what happens with our pleasure too. We get a drop of shame and then we, that drop of shame, let's say it's about sex or intimacy or your body. Runs through your entire system. Okay, let's get back to Yellowstone. So in 1995, something incredible happens. Scientists reintroduced a small pack of wolves into Yellowstone.
So something shifted immediately. Then the elk stopped lingering by the rivers because of the predator of the wolves, and that started to allow the plants to grow back. The trees and the willows returned with them. The beavers came back. Building dams that reshaped the waterways. Songbirds found their home.
The entire ecosystem healed itself and it's all happy ending, all because of one single shift, the return of the wolves. This is what a trophic cascade is. It's a domino effect that starts with one change and ripples through the entire system. Your body works just like that. So let's take this example of sexual shame again when we introduce de sympathetic nervous system energy, predator energy back in, in response to this shame.
So we. We, um, we interrupt this pattern of freeze that hap that often happens when we experience shame, body shame, sexual shame. If we introduce some action, energy, energy, some predator energy back in, you start noticing that you have more capacity to stay with your erotic experiences. Your body like Yellowstone is a complex, interconnected, and intelligent system.
Every part of you is connected. Your nervous system, your breath, your muscles, your pleasure pathway. So when you experience stress, trauma, chronic disconnection, it's like the wolves have been removed, your body stops functioning the way it is meant to. Your body's ecosystem goes out of black balance. It's, you might notice it in different ways.
Maybe you feel numb during sex. Maybe your libido has dis disappeared, or maybe your body just doesn't respond the way you want it to. But for a lot of people, this can feel permanent, like it's just something wrong with them or like they're broken. But here's the truth, your body is not broken. It's just waiting for the right conditions to shift.
And just like Yellowstone, your body doesn't need an overhaul. It doesn't need to be forced into pleasure or desire. It just needs one small shift. One wolf that once reintroduced can start to change everything. I
so. I'm gonna tell you a little client story here, just giving you an example of this. So I had a client who came to me because she felt totally disconnected from sex. She loved her partner, she trusted him. They had an amazing partnership other than the sex. And she wanted to want sex, but she just didn't.
It wasn't about attraction or effort. It was just like her body had shut down. And you know what the real problem was? Is she was trying to force herself into it, expecting pleasure to just happen. So instead of jumping straight to fixing the issue, what we did was we started working with a trophic cascade in her body.
I had her spend five minutes a day just simply noticing touch. Her bedsheets, her fingertips, her own breath against her skin. There was no goal, no pressure. And in a couple of weeks she started to notice a shift. She, her body was given an experience that was contrary to what it had before. So if your body is used to this experience of not enjoying sensation, or you are trying to force sensation.
