Liz Tenuto has built a large following on TikTok by sharing physical exercises designed to release stress and trauma. With over a million followers on the social media platform, Tenuto calls herself “The Workout Witch”, promoting 30-day online training courses that she claims will take anyone “from pain to strength”.
In a TikTok post with 1.6 million views, Tenuto gave a simple yet complex answer for people wondering why they feel stuck. Tenuto shared a video of herself, wearing a black gym outfit, lying on her side, gently swaying back and forth.
Tenuto shared the reason why many of us find it difficult to get out of bed, sit in the towel after a shower, and don’t enjoy going outside is because of the chronic freeze shock response.
The text on the post reads: “When you realize why you’re sitting in a towel for 20 minutes after showering, you no longer enjoy going out, and you frequently isolate yourself because you’re living in a frozen state from dealing with massive amounts of stress, which is also why it’s so hard to get out of bed.”, muscle tension, and holding your breath all the time.
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In the caption, Tenuto declared that people can “break out of the freeze response” and experience “total body liberation” through physical exercise.
Tenuto shares her story on her website, combining her background with her methodology. She introduces herself as “a somatic specialist, a survivor of narcissistic abuse, and someone who knows—firsthand—that chronic pain, anxiety, and past trauma are all connected.”
“I learned what anger was at an unusually young age from a narcissistic parent,” she explains. “It was something that became an unfortunate constant throughout my childhood — affecting me in ways I could recognize, but also in ways I could never recognize.”
Tenuto explained her experience as someone who has suffered from “chronic, unexplained pain and muscle tension” since she was 10 years old. She described the physical discomfort as something manageable at first, an inconvenience that “became a new normal for [her]… but as the years passed, this inconvenience became unbearable. My pain became unbearable. And the life I was living honestly was unbearable.” for living.
It took until her mid-20s to find relief from chronic pain and anxiety.
Tinuto discovered somatic exercise, which she defines as “gentle therapeutic movements that connect your physical body to your emotional body,” and it has alleviated her chronic pain by addressing the root causes of her trauma.
“It turns out that your body can feel a lot better than it used to,” she says. Tenuto has turned her journey toward healing to help others do the same.
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She holds a degree in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, along with physical certifications in Feldenkrais and Pilates, specializing in injuries and illnesses. She supports her 15 years of clinical teaching experience as “changing the conversation about how trauma and anxiety affect the body.”
She focuses in particular on how “trauma, anxiety, stress, and emotional experiences are all connected to the unexplained aches and pains that we have been programmed across generations to just ‘put up with.’”
Tenuto’s physical practices and online presence carry the belief that people can live without pain and that people can be healed.
She offers several 30-day online courses, focusing on exercises to release tension in the hips, lower back, and shoulders. She stresses that the programs do more than just address the physical manifestations of the stress that causes the pain — they “will allow your body to eliminate the deep-rooted cause behind where the pain came from in the first place.”
As she explains, chronic pain is an indicator of a deeper problem, one rooted in the stress, anxiety, and trauma a person carries in their body. All humans have experienced some level of trauma. The past three years of the global pandemic have exposed this reality. Tenuto’s work aims to heal the physical and emotional wounds we carry as human beings.
As more people become aware of the reality of generational trauma, these conversations are amplified, allowing greater access to the healing modalities that everyone deserves.
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