Transforming Trauma: Episode 184

What happens when a vocalist trained in the art of performance discovers that the deepest music she could ever make begins with learning how to stop performing? For Elizabeth Remic Simonian, the journey from conservatory-trained singer to integrative and somatic therapist was not a departure from music but a homecoming to something she had been reaching toward her entire life. Her story illuminates a truth that therapists, educators, and healers of all kinds are hungry to hear: that the most profound shift in how we meet another human being has little to do with acquiring better tools, and everything to do with how willing we are to show up as ourselves.

On this episode of Transforming Trauma, host Emily Ruth welcomes Elizabeth Remic Simonian for an intimate conversation about therapy not as something we do, but how we live.. Together, they explore how Elizabeth’s path from teaching voice at a conservatory to working with survivors of sexual abuse and complex trauma revealed a through-line she had always sensed but could never quite name. That through-line is presence, and it changes everything – from music to therapy.

Elizabeth is an integrative and somatic therapist based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Born in Cyprus to Swedish and Armenian parents, she spent her formative years moving between cultures before settling in the Netherlands in 2003. She is a Somatic Experiencing practitioner, Soma Embodiment practitioner, and has completed her NARM® Master Therapist certificate alongside advanced training in somatic sexuality healing. Her earlier career as a jazz vocalist and conservatory voice teacher profoundly shapes the embodied, heartful quality she brings to her clinical work.

“Nobody had ever started a session with asking me what I would like,” Elizabeth recalls of her first experience as a client in the NeuroAffective Relational Model®. Having spent many years in therapy, she had become expert at being the easy, accommodating client, reading what practitioners needed and delivering it. When a NARM therapist simply asked what she wanted for herself, the ground shifted. That single, consent-based question disrupted a lifetime of adaptive strategies and opened a door she did not know was closed. It is a moment she returns to throughout the conversation as foundational, not only for her own healing, but for how she now meets every person who walks into her practice.

Elizabeth traces her interest in NARM back to watching a demonstration where something subtle but unmistakable caught her attention. It was the way the practitioner respected the space the client needed, the quality of consent present in every exchange. She contrasts this with a moment in another training where an instructor encouraged therapists who felt stuck to reach into a “box of interventions” for something to fix the situation. “Everything in my body just went no, no, no,” she says. That visceral rejection of the fix-it model became a compass pointing her toward NARM, where she found what she describes as coming home.

One of the most striking threads in the conversation is Elizabeth’s exploration of efforting, a concept central to NARM that invites practitioners to notice where their own adaptive strategies are running the show. “If I’m efforting, the connection isn’t there in the same way,” she reflects. “And if the connection isn’t there, then what are we doing? Because isn’t that what most people have been lacking and are hoping to find?”

Perhaps the most compelling dimension of the conversation is how Elizabeth describes NARM’s influence rippling far beyond the therapy room and into her years of teaching voice at a Dutch conservatory. As her own NARM process deepened, she began bringing that quality of relational presence into her music lessons, not as a therapeutic intervention, but as a natural extension of who she was becoming. The results were unmistakable. Students became more comfortable, more open, more willing to break down in lessons and find genuine strength. More and more students asked to transfer into her classes. She found this remarkable precisely because she was not investing in new vocal techniques or performance skills. She was investing in her own embodiment. “I’m currently not busy with more technique,” she says. “I’m busy with something completely different. And this is translating into music.”

Elizabeth’s reflection on her own voice carries a quiet power. She describes how, as a conservatory student, her voice would shut down during exams even though performing on stage felt entirely different. That pattern, she now understands, was never simply a technical problem. It was a somatic expression of something much deeper. She wonders aloud what might have been different if a teacher had met that moment with sensitivity and curiosity rather than treating it as a deficit to correct. It is this wondering that fuels her interest in bringing NARM-informed awareness to educators, particularly within the arts, where competition and the pressure to prove oneself can intensify the very strategies that constrict creativity and voice.

The conversation arrives at a beautiful paradox. Elizabeth describes singing with less technical practice but far more embodiment, less shame, and more authenticity than she has ever experienced. “I cannot tell you what a difference it makes to sing with more embodiment and less shame and more authenticity,” she says. “I have never loved to sing more than I do now.” It is a living demonstration that when we reduce the efforting and inhabit ourselves more fully, something opens that no amount of technique alone can produce. The voice, both literal and metaphorical, finds its ground.

What emerges from this episode is not a list of strategies for better therapy or better teaching, but an invitation to consider what becomes possible when we stop efforting and start inhabiting ourselves more fully. Elizabeth’s story suggests that the practitioner’s internal state is not a footnote to the work. It is the work. And its effects reach far beyond the consulting room, into classrooms, onto stages, and into every relationship where one human being dares to show up, fully present, with another.

Transforming Trauma is deeply grateful to Elizabeth for the generosity and openheartedness she brings to this conversation. Her willingness to share the sacred, pivotal moments of her journey reminds us that healing unfolds not through perfecting our interventions, but through the ongoing, courageous act of coming home to ourselves.