Ana’s piece, “That Cruel Voice In Your Head,” is one of her most intimate and clinically profound offerings yet. Through the metaphor of the Captain, Ana doesn’t just describe hypervigilance—she reframes it as sacred, powerful, and worthy of respect. This isn’t a poem. It’s a clinical reorientation of inner survival structures, delivered through poetic narrative, and rooted in somatic intelligence, IFS (Internal Family Systems), and trauma-informed recovery.

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Get the Book: The Trauma We Don't Talk About https://amzn.to/41SjKKL

Ana is redefining the “cruel,” loud, command-like voice that trauma survivors often live with. This voice—the one that never lets them rest, pushes them through fear, shames their softness, rushes them to act—is not broken or abusive.

It is the Captain:
A once-curious, confident, alive part that was forced to transform into a hypervigilant protector in order to survive trauma, war, displacement, and injustice.

Ana isn’t just naming this part—she is witnessing it and inviting survivors to shift their relationship to it.

What you call harsh or cruel inside yourself may actually be the most loyal part of you—the one that carried you through when everything else fell apart.

This “cruel” inner voice:

• Was not born that way.

• Was forced to become a warrior when peace, trust, and ease were no longer available.

• Became hypervigilant not to hurt you, but to keep you alive.

Ana teaches that PTSD and trauma healing is not about silencing this voice—but about bowing to it, witnessing it, and inviting it to finally rest.

• It didn’t appear from nowhere.

• It evolved out of necessity when the inner child was left unprotected.

• It became the Captain: structured, fast-moving, commanding, and intense.

• It’s not sabotaging you—it’s holding your nervous system together.

• It led you through war, displacement, injustice, humiliation, and fear.

• It pushed you to get up when you wanted to collapse.

• You can’t simply “quiet” it with self-help tools.

• It doesn’t respond to invalidation—it responds to being seen and honored.

• The Captain “goes nuts” at slowness because urgency was the survival language.

• (00:00:01) - The HyperVigilant Part of People with PTSD
• (00:09:47) - A Moment of Rest for the Captain

Ana is fierce, compassionate, and unyieldingly grounded in truth-telling. She speaks directly to those living with trauma and PTSD—not with pity, not with patronizing wellness clichés—but with deep integrity, lived experience, and clinical authority.

Here's what she's saying at a deeper level:

Core Message “There is no running toward” encapsulates Ana’s thesis: The trauma body doesn’t move toward love, safety, or connection—it only runs away from danger. Why? Because it never had a safe person or safe place to run toward. That reality lives not just in memory, but in nervous system patterning, deeply somatic and biological.

️ What She’s Disrupting Ana is calling out the wellness industry, especially influencers who commodify trauma with overused terms like “resilience” or “self-care” without understanding the raw, body-level truth of trauma.

She is also critiquing meditation teachers who tell trauma survivors to “close their eyes” without grasping how that is unsafe and re-traumatizing for someone hypervigilant after war, genocide, or childhood abuse.

She exposes: Buzzword inflation (“resilience,” “trauma” used as branding) Spiritual bypassing (the “run toward light” narrative) Toxic self-help culture (that glamorizes growth while ignoring structural, historical, and somatic realities)

Her Distinct Teaching Ana brings forward a radically embodied truth:

“You are not running toward safety. You are running from pain. And that’s why you’re exhausted.”

This is not metaphor—it is a biological pattern, a trauma-loop. And she doesn’t shame her listeners. Instead, she offers a path: micro-moments of safety. A flicker of light. A breath. A safe person. A safe location. She makes it real: You don’t need a perfect safe place, just a molecular one. You don’t need to run harder—you need to pause without collapsing. Safety is not an idea—it’s a body-state.

Why She Stands Out Ana is not like other podcasters in the trauma, wellness, or psychology space because: She refuses performance. No polished branding, no spiritual ego, no detached “expertise.”

She speaks from the body, not just about it. She centers structural trauma (genocide, war, poverty, exile) rather than minimizing trauma into lifestyle language. She is somatically precise. She gives experiential steps, not vague inspiration. She brings accountability and love together—there’s no self-soothing without collective care, and no healing without reckoning.

Powerful Takeaways “Start with one pleasant thought in your mind.” “Keep your eyes open if that’s safer.” “Find one safe person and one safe place. That’s the beginning.” “You are not broken for not trusting. You never had a safe place to trust from.”

Get the Book: The Trauma We Don't Talk About https://amzn.to/41SjKKL

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Ana Mael’s Unique Approach to Trauma Healing: Ana Mael offers a trauma-informed, justice-centered approach to healing. As a somatic therapist and genocide survivor, Ana’s unique insights stem from lived experience. She doesn’t just teach healing in the traditional sense; she advocates for truth, accountability, and dignity as core components of trauma recovery. Her work speaks to marginalized communities—those who have been forced to suppress their emotions and voices in the face of violenc...

• (00:00:02) - We with the Trauma Can't Trust Anyone
• (00:08:28) - Running Away From Trauma
• (00:14:00) - How to Find Peace and Safety in Your Life

Ana is sounding the alarm: fascism doesn’t begin with violence—it begins with apathy. It creeps in through:

• disinterest,

• detachment masked as spirituality,

• normalized silence,

• the overemphasis on self-care as a form of avoidance.

She is not dismissing self-care, but calling out how it’s been commodified into an escape hatch—a way for people to say, “not my circus, not my problem,” while the world burns around them.

She draws a bold line between early fascism and the bystander effect. It doesn’t require weapons to begin—just a populace too tuned out, too passive, or too spiritually “above it all” to act.

“Fascism doesn’t begin with guns. It begins with disinterest.”

Ana criticizes how some spiritual communities tell people to “stay in their frequency” or ignore the suffering of others under the guise of “vibrational alignment.” This, she argues, is spiritual bypassing and a dereliction of collective moral duty.

“Spiritual influencers telling you to stay in your own frequency…”

She’s not against self-care. She is against using it to replace collective action. When we idolize self-care and ignore community responsibility, we are sacrificing our shared humanity.

“Self-care has become the new religion, and the price of that religion is our humanity.”

Ana speaks with:

• Radical clarity – There’s no soft-pedaling.

• Moral urgency – It’s a wake-up call to a community lulled by comfort and detachment.

• Feminist and anti-fascist resistance – This is aligned with activist traditions rooted in trauma-informed, politically aware healing.

• Healing without action = complicity.
  We cannot heal in isolation while harm is enacted around us. Ana insists that true healing includes moral responsibility to others.

• Collective care must return.
  The absence of collective care has left us vulnerable to oppressive systems—and we can’t afford to keep paying that price.

• Reclaim community and moral bravery.
  This is a call to remember our shared obligations as citizens, neighbors, and humans—especially when laws are being signed in silence.

Ana is pushing against a rising tide of:

• performative healing,

• detached spirituality,

• passive liberalism.

Her voice re-centers the urgent moral work of being alive during political collapse. She’s inviting her audience—particularly trauma survivors and empathic people—to stop retreating inward as their only response. She’s saying:

“Your healing is real. But so is the world. Don’t trade one for the other.”

Ana Mael’s Unique Approach to Trauma Healing:

Ana Mael offers a trauma-informed, justice-centered approach to healing. As a somatic therapist and genocide survivor, Ana’s unique insights stem from lived experience. She doesn’t just teach healing in the traditional sense; she advocates for truth, acco...

• (00:00:00) - Self-Care has become the new religion