Healing Trauma And Finding Inner Peace – Exclusive Interview With Anda Vintila

Anda Vintila is a Registered Clinical Counsellor. She owns a private practice in Vancouver, BC where she regularly sees clients who seek a deeper way to heal from their trauma, patterns, and conditionings. Anda weaves different body-centered modalities that focus on supporting the nervous system and body to have greater capacity in moving through difficult emotions and sensations in order to feel safer in one’s self and within relationships. Anda believes the inner work is ultimately led by the Soul. She is passionate about shining awareness on aspects of the self that obstruct one’s access to flow and life-force energy and creating room for newer perspectives to emerge.

Anda Vintila, Clinical Counsellor & Somatic Psychotherapist

Introduce yourself! What led you to becoming a psychotherapist? And, what approaches do you use to support clients?

Hello! I’m so glad to be given this opportunity to write for Brainz Magazine. My name is Anda Vintila and I’m a Registered Clinical Counsellor and Somatic Psychotherapist. To answer your first question, many experiences in my life led me to this calling. Ever since I was a child, I could sense so much of what was unspoken between my parents, between other people, and within myself. I was always drawn to contemplate and feel into the depths of a feeling, a thought, and of an experience. I felt internally guided to analyze a situation or information that came my way, leaving no stone unturned. I was a sensitive child and growing up in Eastern Europe, then immigrating to Canada with my parents, paved the road to a difficult journey of finding belonging but also staying true to myself. My process of experiencing a difficult upbringing, becoming aware of generational patterns that I was re-enacting and fighting up against, and my love for connection and supporting others in healing and becoming more conscious all influence how I present-day guide clients in their own processes of transformation. I believe my own inner work is foundational to my capacity to hold space and join a client in their inner processes of transformation. I often return back to this question: in this moment, how can we redirect our awareness to feel into and merge once again with our soul nature? With our own unique rhythm.

The approaches I use to support clients often include creating nervous system awareness and re-shaping (which is often disrupted from overwhelming difficult experiences such as trauma), dream exploration, shadow work, intergenerational healing, developing safety in feeling emotions, and attachment work focused on forming and maintaining safe and nourishing relationships.

Do you notice any challenging themes or patterns show up with clients that you’d like to share with us and different ways you would approach them?

Yes, I notice many themes and patterns show up for clients that I see. First, I’d like to start off by saying that since I’ve become a therapist, I’ve noticed that most clients who are drawn to working with me share at least a few challenging patterns that I have experienced or continue to face in my own inner work. Holding this knowing in my awareness often creates a safe container for clients to let me into their inner emotional worlds and slowly over time allow the relationship we share to be a route to transforming the relationship they have with themselves and those around them. So, to answer your question more directly, a majority of folks who are drawn to working with me tend to have experienced difficult upbringings that created ruptures in their relationship with Self and others. These ruptures led to patterns of disconnection from one’s soul self and body, chronic shame, abandonment fears, self-worth struggles, anger and self-destruction tendencies, people pleasing and appeasing others above their own needs, depression, anxiety, fear of stepping into full self-expression, and feeling cut off from one’s instincts and intuition.

When I step back and look at these patterns, I see deep wounding resulting from generations of parents who were once children that were also not parented in attuned and gentle ways. In my Somatic Experiencing training, my teacher once said, “Sometimes love is not enough”. And what she meant was that often these generational wounds are passed intergenerationally because parents themselves were not properly supported – and we can love our children and still not have the skills to meet their needs. So, in my work with clients, I view not only a client’s expression of their challenges on the individual level but also on the family system level, and the societal level. I like to create a space where all of these aspects we see in ourself can be observed through a lens of interconnection rather than viewing our challenges to be solely generated within us as an individual. I like to show up for clients in a kind and authentic way for them to experience the possibility of trust within relationship which then they can develop within themselves and with others. To repair and mend the needs and longings the child self was not able to receive and to integrate the child’s needs into the adult self is often at the core of my work with clients (and myself!). I believe this work supports a person to become a more conscious, authentic, and safe human to embody and to be in a relationship with.

Do you have any advice on how to be with conflict or crisis and how to remain hopeful during the process of healing?

What I have come to realize is how each crisis or conflict I move through serves to humble me in order to transform an old perspective I hold into a more truthful perspective that benefits both myself and my community. This continuous lesson of humility can re-shape our egos and make room for our most innate and larger Self to emerge. Depth Psychologist Carl Jung discusses the importance of turning towards the Self, our un-breakable inner wholeness, and letting it guide us through adverse situations like a compass. I personally see this process as an act of surrender, as a way of widening our perspective, zooming out to the edges of ourself to allow different perspectives and inner experiences to come in. Loosening the grip on our need to control and logically find our way out of a difficult situation and letting our other modes of knowing to have access to us such as sensing, feeling, and noticing inner images emerging.

Alongside this wider and spiritual approach to adversity, I also want to add in the importance of working with our body because trauma and difficult patterning is often experienced through our feelings and sensations, not just through our thought patterns. Can we allow ourselves to pause, place a hand over our heart and belly, notice our breath without trying to change it, and notice what sensation or emotion wants to bubble up? Can we also notice a part of us that feels neutral (the outer edges of your arms, maybe the tip of your nose?) and take that bit of safety in?

Lastly, I would like to say how important it is to remind ourselves of how many of us collectively are in this healing process and path; we are a tribe. In the greater energetic field, we are all (including our ancestors) holding each other through the tough parts of this journey. Remaining hopeful is so courageous, and sometimes we need to call up a friend, join a community, and be with animals and nature to harness that courage to hope again. We also need each other to come back to laughter, to play, to create, to move our bodies – this also helps us to have courage to hope again.

Who and what has shaped your therapeutic style and decision to work both somatically and spiritually? Where does your inspiration come from?

My therapeutic style and inspiration is deeply owed to a list of therapists and artists who I believe have immensely contributed to creating therapeutic processes to heal complex trauma and deep childhood wounding. Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, is one of the leading therapists who has devoted multiple decades of his life to emphasizing the importance of including and working with the nervous system and body to heal from trauma. I am forever inspired and led by Peter’s deep respect and advocacy for a person’s dignity, self-autonomy, and inherent capacity to heal.

Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, writer of “The Body Keeps the Score”, also is a pioneer in somatic psychotherapy who says “we remember trauma less in words and more with our feelings and our bodies”. And there are so many more giants who have forged psycho-spiritual ways of healing, such as Janina Fisher, Carl Jung, Resmaa Menakem, Pat Ogden, Alan Schore, Kathy Kain, Gabor Mate, Jumana Sophia, Dr. Leslie Ellis, Bert Hellinger, and many, many more. I consider myself blessed to have had the privilege of learning in programs led by some of these pioneers. I also have a deep gratitude for personal and professional mentors who have contributed to shaping who I am today: thank you, Agata Burdziuk and Shama Yaygin.

I bow to all of those who came before me and paved the way for me to heal and to support other souls in healing. 

Thank you for joining me here & if you’re interested in learning more about the different topics related to what I call “Soul-Led Inner Work” such as Somatic Psychotherapy, nervous system support, trauma healing, dream exploration, family constellations and ancestral work, shadow work, and relational healing, I encourage you to browse through my upcoming articles!

Read more from Anda Vintila