Healing Through Nervous System and Ancestral Wisdom – Interview with Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain

Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain is a licensed clinical social worker, somatic therapist, and the founder of Healthemindset, a fully remote practice serving empaths, highly sensitive people, and BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities across California. Trained in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) under Dr. Diana Fosha's direct lineage, he integrates polyvagal theory, somatic therapy, and ancestral healing rooted in his Choctaw and Chickasaw heritage into a genuinely integrative approach to mental health care.

In this interview, Chris explores why the nervous system is at the center of sustainable healing, what Indigenous wisdom traditions have always known that modern psychology is only beginning to catch up to, and what it looks like to build a clinical practice that refuses to leave culture, ancestry, and the full complexity of the human experience at the door.

Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain, Psychotherapist & Ancestral Healer, LCSW

You have built a practice that draws on both cutting-edge clinical training and Indigenous healing traditions rooted in your Choctaw and Chickasaw heritage. How did those two worlds come together for you?

For a long time, they did not, at least not consciously. I came up through a clinical training system that had little room for Indigenous wisdom as legitimate clinical knowledge. I learned to keep them in separate rooms: the evidence base in one, the ancestral knowing in another.

What changed was completing my AEDP Immersion training under Dr. Diana Fosha's lineage. AEDP is built on the premise that healing is a natural drive and that, given the right conditions, the human system moves toward wholeness, the way a plant moves toward light. When I encountered that clinically, my traditions had been saying exactly that for centuries.

At their deepest level, the somatic approach and the ancestral approach are saying the same thing: healing is not only cognitive, but it also involves the whole person, and it happens in a relationship. AEDP gave me a clinical map of how the nervous system moves through healing. My ancestors gave me a map of what that healing is for. I use both maps now, always.

Healthemindset specifically serves empaths and highly sensitive people. What drew you to this population, and what do you most want them to understand about themselves?

What drew me to this population is that I am one. I spent years being told I was too much, too sensitive, too affected by things others seemed to shake off. I internalized that quietly and completely for far too long.

What I most want highly sensitive people to understand is that their nervous system was never malfunctioning. Sensory Processing Sensitivity, the biological trait underlying high sensitivity, is present in roughly 15 to 20 percent of the population. It is not a disorder. It is a difference in depth of processing that, without support, looks like a liability and, with the right support, becomes an extraordinary professional and relational asset.

The work is not about making clients less sensitive. It is about helping them stop fighting their nervous system and start working with it. The shift in how they move through the world once that happens is remarkable.

You work with BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities in a field that has historically caused harm to both. What does genuinely affirming care look like in practice, versus what falls short?

A rainbow flag in the waiting room and correct pronouns are the floor, not the ceiling. Genuinely affirming care for LGBTQ+ clients means understanding minority stress theory, first introduced by psychologist Ilan Meyer, which documents how chronic exposure to stigma creates measurable physiological stress in the nervous system over time.

For BIPOC clients, it means honesty about the history of the field, including the DSM's history of pathologizing identity and research biases that excluded communities of color. NAMI has documented persistent disparities in mental health access and quality for BIPOC communities. A clinician who has not done their own work on race and power is not a neutral presence in the room.

What I offer is different because I sit inside these communities. I am a queer person of Choctaw and Chickasaw descent. This work is not something I do for my clients. It is something I do alongside them.

You completed AEDP Immersion training under Dr. Diana Fosha's lineage, which you have described as personally transformative. What shifted for you?

AEDP gave me a map to the places in myself that I understood intellectually and felt very little. There were parts of my healing that had been circling for years. I could describe them perfectly and nothing was actually moving.

What AEDP taught me is that insight has a ceiling. Understanding lives in the cortex. Real, embodied change lives in the body, specifically in the body within a safe relational experience. The felt sense of being genuinely seen and met by another person is not an add-on to the therapeutic process. According to the research, it is the mechanism.

There is a concept in AEDP called transformational affects, the feelings that arise not from the wound but from the healing itself. I had never been taught that healing felt like anything specific. When I experienced those states, first personally and then learned to facilitate them in clients, I stopped managing people's pain and started accompanying them toward something that actually surprised them.

Your entire practice is remote. Many clinicians are skeptical about whether somatic work can translate across a screen. What has your experience shown you?

AEDP trains clinicians to track extremely subtle cues: the quality of a client's breath, microexpressions before an emotion surfaces consciously, the way a person's eyes shift when something lands in the body rather than the mind. All of that is fully accessible over video. The screen becomes a frame, and within that frame, I am reading everything.

What surprised me most was what the home environment offers clinically. A client once had her grandmother's handmade quilt draped over the chair she sat in for every session. We spent an entire session with that quilt as the anchor. She began sharing about her grandmother, a woman who had passed down plant medicine, herbal prayers, and ritual practices woven so seamlessly into daily life that, as a child, she had not recognized them as ceremony. That material would never have surfaced in a traditional office. It became some of the most potent clinical work we ever did.

The virtual frame also gives clients with trauma histories a felt sense of safety they cannot always access in a stranger's office. They are on their own ground, and from that baseline, we can go further, faster.

Something that sets your practice apart is using anime, gaming, and comics as clinical tools. What does that look like in session?

I grew up deeply connected to anime and gaming. Series like Demon Slayer, Black Clover, and One Piece were not just entertainment. They were places I went to feel things I did not yet have language for, characters navigating versions of what I was living who were too intense for the world around them, learning to use their gifts rather than suppress them.

When working with highly sensitive people and young adults who grew up in those same worlds, I noticed that the moment I referenced a character they loved, something shifted. Defenses softened because we were no longer talking about them directly. That is the clinical power of narrative distance: sometimes the most direct path to a feeling is a sideways one, through a character who already holds the emotional weight.

I now use it intentionally. I ask clients which character they feel most like right now and which character they want to become. It creates a bridge between the imaginative and the somatic, and for clients told their whole lives that these loves are childish, having them treated as clinically significant is itself a healing experience.

What are you building with Healthemindset, and what do you want people to know about why it exists?

Healthemindset exists because I needed a container large enough to hold all of it: the clinical rigor and the ancestral wisdom, the evidence base and the ceremony, the individual nervous system and the lineage it carries. I could not find that container anywhere else, so I built it.

What I am building is a practice and brand that treats mental health as a whole-person, whole-lineage endeavor. That means direct clinical work through telehealth, accessible across California through major insurance platforms. It means content, courses, and community, including The Grounded Empath, my five-day course for highly sensitive people.

I want people to know that Healthemindset is not a wellness brand dressed in clinical language. It is a clinical practice that refuses to leave culture, ancestry, and the full complexity of the human experience at the door. There is a version of healing that does not ask you to become smaller or more Western to receive it. One that meets you in your own home, in your own body, in your own story.

For someone who has spent years feeling like they just have not found the right kind of help, what would you want them to know about where to start?

The first thing I want them to know is that not finding the right help is not the same as being beyond help. The mental health system was not built for everyone, and for a lot of the people I serve, particularly BIPOC clients, LGBTQ+ people, and empaths who were told their sensitivity was a problem, the frameworks they were offered were genuinely not built with them in mind. That is a design failure, not a personal one.

Where I would invite them to start is with the body, not the narrative. Before asking "why do I feel this way," ask "where do I feel this in my body, and what does it need right now?" The nervous system knows things the thinking mind has not yet caught up to. Learning to listen to it, even in small ways, is the beginning of a different kind of relationship with yourself.

I would invite them to look for a clinician who brings their whole self to the work, not just a credential. The quality of the relationship is the medicine. Research on therapeutic outcomes consistently shows that the strength of the therapeutic alliance predicts healing more than any specific technique. Find someone who makes your nervous system feel safe. That safety is where everything else becomes possible.

If you look ten years into the future, what do you hope Healthemindset has contributed, and what do you most want your work to leave behind?

Ten years from now, I hope that the people who found Healthemindset when they needed it have gone on to pass something forward: a different relationship with their own sensitivity, a reclaimed thread of ancestral wisdom, a nervous system that finally knows what regulated feels like. Not because of any one technique I taught them, but because they experienced, in a real relational context, that healing is possible and that it feels like something.

For the field, I hope this work contributes to a wider conversation about what clinical legitimacy actually means, and whether the frameworks we have inherited are large enough to hold the full range of human healing wisdom. Research in epigenetics and polyvagal theory is already building bridges toward what Indigenous traditions have always known. I want to be part of the generation of clinicians who refuse to keep those worlds separate. Epigenetics researchpolyvagal theory.

Personally, I want my Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestors to recognize what I built. Not because it mirrors the past, but because it carries the thread forward with integrity. That is the only metric that matters to me at the end of the day. Did I honor what was passed to me? Did I make it available to people who needed it? Did I leave the lineage stronger than I found it? That is the work.

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