About the Episode
Ready to understand a key element of depression and all other mental struggles that can unlock healing? Dr. Julie Lopez sits down with intuitive, trauma-informed speaker Claudia Cauterucci for a powerful conversation on redefining depression. Claudia, a renowned psychotherapist, bestselling author, and founder of Dynamic R-Evolution, shares her deep insights into the complexities of mental health. Together, they explore why it is so important to step away from labels to find healing and hope.
Today’s Guest: Claudia Cauterucci
Claudia Cauterucci is a psychotherapist, bestselling author, and internationally recognized as an intuitive, trauma-informed speaker and founder of her unique psycho-spiritual curriculum, Dynamic R-Evolution.
She inspires trauma survivors, empaths, public figures, creators, and entrepreneurs towards getting what she calls “a multidimensional PhD on themselves”. Multilingual and multicultural, she helms a therapy practice in Washington, D.C., and provides a 12-week leadership training for C-Suite, creatives, and influencers called The Empath Leader, a program she specifically created in response to post-pandemic global socio-political shifts and places the Empath in a prominent role.
Claudia is also the producer and host of her podcast, Heaven on Earth, where she highlights the ways her guests are adding dynamic solutions, intimacy, and healing for the evolution of our planet.
Claudia identifies as a Colorful person rather than a person of color.
Connect with Claudia Cauterucci:
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Transcript
Content
- Introduction
- Mental Health for Wellness
- Mental health challenges post-pandemic
- Benefits and Challenges of Diagnosis in Mental Health
- The Meditative Power of Naming Emotions
- The Dangers of Labels Like Depression
- Depression on the Energetic Scale of Emotions
- Claudia’s Dynamic R-Evolution Curriculum
Introduction
Welcome to the Viva View. I’m Julie Lopez and I am so pleased to introduce you to Claudia Cauterucci.
Not only is she a brilliant goddess, she is also the author of a newly released book called The Empath Leader. And of course, she is a very empathic leader, you’re about to find out. She also is a very talented speaker, speaking on all kinds of topics, but what she really likes to talk about is the supreme and divine gifts we have every moment, every day by embracing what she calls heaven on earth.
It’s really the ultimate being present with yourself and the world around you that unearths all these riches. And she has groups and she has all kinds of stuff, but stay till the end. We are gonna talk today about some labels.
We like to redefine the way we understand mental health. And we’re thinking about talking about some of these labels that fall under the category of depression. Please stay until the end because guess what? We’re going to get some of Claudia’s special magic when she explains how to bust through some of these hard things that we can experience as it relates to mental health.
And she’s gonna give us some insights and some freebies that come directly out of her dynamic re-evolution curriculum so we’re so lucky to have you today, Claudia. How are you?
Why is Mental Health Important?
Claudia: Thank you so much, Julie, for that opening. I feel bathed in your words. And thank you for this podcast because I think it’s right on track with where we are as a humanity and where we are as a planet. It’s almost like mental health doesn’t have to be this clinical, just in this box anymore. It’s just part of our overall wellness and you keep having that conversation, like this isn’t about us being broken.
And you say that a lot. It’s about us moving into more expansion and wellness. It’s about wellness.
Julie: Yes, completely.
Claudia: So thanks so much for holding a podcast like this to have these conversations.
Mental health challenges post-pandemic
Julie: Absolutely. And I actually, before we even get into it, I wanna piggyback off something that you said because we are in a really tumultuous time on our planet on many different levels. We here in Washington, DC are experiencing an excessive heat wave. I think also four years post-pandemic, there’s a lot of people catching up with some of the grief and loss and shock and awe and distress that they went through during that time and we’re seeing it.
So when we’re talking about something like depression, which is so heavy, I actually think we’re seeing an uptick in that now and it’s just people catching up with all that they had to go through in these past number of years, not to mention the political and violent landscape that we’re looking at across the globe. It’s really a very difficult time for humanity.
Claudia: Yeah, gosh, there’s so many things I wanna piggyback on there.
So I feel like let’s start with the good news as always. The good news is, yes, I think the pandemic hit hard and the way that I describe it is anytime we go inside, right, Julie? Anytime we go inside, whether it’s through psychotherapy or meditation and usually because of something external. We get cancer, we’re in a divorce, we’re in a bad custody battle, we have an accident of some sort.
Sometimes things like that force us to go inside and tinker, tinker with our past, tinker with our pain, tinker. And I think the pandemic as a humanity had us all go inside and we had to really look at, do I want this? Do I want this job? Do I want this dress? Do I want this marriage? I mean, there are so many things that as a humanity we had to face. And I think we’ve seen the ripple since the pandemic of all of that. And it’s bubbling forward because there’s this move to be normal and yet all of that was traumatic, right? All of that really brought up our stuff.
And my latest thing, Julie, and you know this through my book and my latest way of approaching what I’m speaking about is something that I call “the small is in the all and the all is in the small”. So basically, how do we approach our humanity and what’s happening on the planet in the same way that we would approach our own healing journey?
All this stuff is happening right now. All this darkness, let’s say, all this pain, all this ickiness, all of our shadow as Jung would say, right? Is coming up. How would we work with that? How do we face the shadow? How do we do it?
Benefits and Challenges of Diagnosis in Mental Health
Julie: I was just gonna say, and it’s interesting that you brought up Jung and the shadow because I think people often, clinicians and lay people alike will say, oh, so-and-so is depressed, let’s just say. So, and that’s interesting because sometimes when people hear that, they’ll say, oh, don’t worry about me, I’m just depressed.
It’s like this label that keeps people in a box, right? This is just me. This is just what’s going on. And I would challenge that and maybe even get your insight on that when, and obviously, as both of us have in clinical backgrounds, there are a whole bunch of diagnostic codes that fall under that umbrella, and in my experience has kind of sometimes kept people stuck, right? Or maybe feeling broken, like you mentioned.
I just wanted to know kind of your thoughts on that based on the work that you do and what you think about that particular experience of feeling just really disconnected from our spark, from our joy, from our energy to do things, the heaviness that accompanies something like that.
Claudia: I want to start by saying that I feel so comforted by the fact that even though you’re an extremely experienced clinician and basically what I mean by that is that you’re credentialed, but that you are open to having different language around this.
And actually, you’re feeling like it’s imperative to do that.
Julie: That’s why I say it’s necessary.
Claudia: Exactly, it’s an imperative to do that.
I have found that sometimes labels or diagnoses, which is how I present clinically when I’m working because I’m required to if the insurance is going to pay, I’m required to provide a diagnosis.
Julie: A political system.
Claudia: Correct, it’s so systemic.
But let me tell you a little bit about labels though. I have also found that when I name something or that when we name it together, there is something that I call it, sometimes naming things are a meditation. The client goes, oh my gosh, it’s not just me feeling like I’m this or I’m that.
Like there is some energetic relief when you can say, wow, well, it sounds like you grew up with a parent who was “click”, right? Or who had these types of symptomology. There is something in labeling, or I would maybe say in naming that does feel like a relief and is important. So I’ve had those two experiences.
Julie: But now we’re gonna get juicy because I would say in the ultimate, I do agree with that. I knew what you were gonna say when you said it because it’s validating. Again, like that move, what you just described is helping someone not feel crazy.
Oh my gosh, I felt bad. I felt alone. I felt all this stuff.
Everything looked good on the outside, but I wasn’t getting any emotional attunement from my parent. Oh, that’s a thing. I never had words for that.
That’s the ultimate definition of empowerment. Language that helps you go, oh yeah, that’s a thing. It was all invisible to me.
It just looked like, oh, that’s just what parents do because these are my parents and this is how they are. And once you say, oh, I’m just gonna make it up, maybe you use a label like you say, oh, it sounds like your father’s narcissistic. I mean, that’s a very popular label people use to say this person’s not really present for you.
They’re all in their own world. And I would say, and I hope on a future episode we’ll cover this, when someone is all up in their own world or fall into a category that we could call narcissistic, and that does damage. This is where life gets more sophisticated, is that, but they’ve also been through their own trauma.
So we’re looking at someone with unprocessed trauma who doesn’t have the capacity or the capability of seeing others. In that they do damage and we can grow this up into the macro. And this is my theory around war and violence and all the things.
But so it’s not to say it doesn’t do damage, but in this more compassionate view, a more accurate thing that would give the same validation might be, sounds like your father went through a lot of stuff as a kid, never processed it. And now as an adult has no capacity for you.
That’s called a lack of emotional attunement. Of course he couldn’t do that because of whatever. It does not make it okay.
And it’s extremely damaging. And here are the studies and here is the, because the real relief is the, right. I’m not crazy.
The Meditative Power of Naming Emotions
Claudia: Correct, correct. And I think sort of this baseline, this beautiful, beautiful baseline of what language can do for the good and for the bad, right. And for the detriment.
The tricky thing with labels…is that they can get rigid. They lock us into the box. And I think rigidity is anti-mental health.
Claudia Cauterucci
It is a little philosophical, but sometimes just having the words or the name, I really do call it a meditation. It bathes our body, and our central nervous system in relief because it’s not just these weird things we’re feeling and seeing and experiencing or even someone saying, wow, I’m so sorry that happened to you.
Like how healing language can be and naming things. I like to say that naming something, because of the experience that it has on the central nervous system, feels like a meditation.
But there is actually a naming meditation. If you go in, if you’re like “grief”, “rage”, “vengeance” right, it’s actually a beautiful way of becoming the observer. And I ask my folks, listen, don’t judge yourself. It keeps us away from judging ourselves, which immediately clamps down on the meditation.
Cause if I have vengeance inside of me, right. We judge ourselves like, oh my God, I don’t want to be vindictive. I don’t want to have that level of rage, but if you just name it.
So I will say like, list it, list it inside yourself. “Sadness”, “rage”, “vengeance”, “rage” some more, right?
Like it’s actually a naming meditation and immediately you feel it. I call it bathing your central nervous system. Little by little, you start to feel that looseness.
And it actually keeps you away from judging yourself. Let’s say you’re married.
“Desire”, “lust”, “craving”, “longing”, right? And, even as I was doing it, I could feel my body just start to collapse in a good way.
So there’s something really powerful that even as clinicians, if we’re intuiting to give things names, to give things words. And I mean, today we can’t talk about it, but we know that in the space that you’re such an expert in is the space of the non-verbals. That is where we don’t have words.
But when we do have them, they can immediately cause some healing. But listen, having said that, the tricky thing with labels all along, on anything, any label, however we come out, is that they can get rigid. They lock us into the box.
And I think rigidity is anti-mental health.
Julie: Yes! Amen. I say that trauma causes rupture and rigidity, and the work is to get back into a state of flow. As best we can. Emotionally, physically, all the things.
Claudia: Exactly. How do we start swaying in the wind, right? As opposed to being so rigid that we’ll break with anything.
So any form of rigidity, and I think this goes for both our clients, Julie, but ourselves as clinicians.
Julie: Absolutely.
The Dangers of Labels Like Depression
Claudia: This is the way I approach all my clients.
I always say, listen, I’ve got to give you that diagnosis if you want to work with insurance.
Julie: Wait, so let me translate so far. I’m going to be the interpreter. I have to be rigid so you can get reimbursed for this.
Claudia: Exactly. Get reimbursed for this. I have to be rigid in order for you to get reimbursed.
We’ll start here. We’ll start here as a label, but inside myself as a trauma-informed, but highly intuitive because I work intuitively, and this is where we bring in what you and I are so aligned because that’s where we’re super aligned. It’s like, how do we as clinicians stay very present where we can give ourselves internal flexibility to move with the client? So like, are they manic, right? Like that might not be manic.
That might be that this person makes you so anxious. You can’t stop moving. You can’t stop talking.
A label like ADHD, right? Like that gets very, very, very tricky very quickly. Can we stay open enough, intuitive enough, and flexible enough to really be tracking the person in front of us and staying open to their unfurling, to their unfurling, right?
Julie: What a great word.
Claudia: Right, because it is an unfurling.
What might look like this at the beginning, and we smack this label on it, but I think in the middle is this idea of rigidity, whether it be because of the label or because of us as clinicians. We know clinicians who are like, oh yeah, this is my depressed client. And all they do then, all their treatment strategy is to be managing a depressed client for years.
Julie: As opposed to, let’s get into it, because that’s my topic. As opposed to, what might be another way to describe someone who is feeling really down or is not having the energy to do things or feels really heavy and despondent?
Claudia: And this is where the presence comes in.
This is whether it be through meditation or really, I think, you know, in my training as a psychodynamic psychotherapist, so much of it was like charting and tracking what’s happening inside of you while you’re in the presence of this person and saying, okay, what am I experiencing? How is this opening right now? How is this contracting right now? Where it’s not just that I labeled and I got stuck there and then also stick the client, right? Then we’re not moving. Then we’re not expanding. Then there’s no possibility of tracking something else like moving.
Julie: Yeah, I wanna pause right there. That is so important. Can you say that again?
Claudia: Sure.
In terms of tracking something else, like, ah.
Julie: That is the danger. That’s the liability.
Claudia: Correct, correct.
Julie: That’s the real damage that we’re trying to counteract, on this podcast, is that when you stick with that label, you stop being curious and you stop the movement and the flow of energy. So you’re colluding with a client who may already feel very, very stuck.
Claudia: You are, you are.
And yet there are all these things right around the corner. And listen, I think the presence and the flexibility work both ways, right? And we talked about like maybe talking about some examples because it works both ways.
But the idea is staying very present in your flexibility because when I was a younger clinician, Julie, I did treat narcissistic personality disordered people. Where I was staying extremely open and like, well, maybe they’re in a bad mood. Maybe they’re just demeaning me because… I would have experiences of getting demeaned in session. And but staying open, staying open and then realizing, oh, maybe if I start really tracking this differently, not so much sticking to a label, but understanding that there is sort of a list of characteristics that are showing up because I would, as a young clinician, allow for many things without boundaries.
So it is like, who am I right now with this person? Who am I constantly with this person? So to move from staying very open to being like, oh, I’ve got to set some boundaries here, right? And that required presence and flexibility to be like, oh, I’m gonna backtrack on how I’m doing this and I’m gonna set some boundaries around how I’m spoken to, for example. So again, I think it requires this being very present. I keep saying that, don’t I?
Julie: Yeah, but it’s your jam, heaven on earth, mama.
Depression on the Energetic Scale of Emotions
Julie: But I do want your perspective on a different way of looking at someone who might show up as someone we could label depressed because what I’ve noticed as a commonality, whether it’s in their conscious life or through multigenerational trauma or some things that are harder to name, like societal nuance that can really keep people feeling oppressed or powerless is that they’re usually brokenhearted in some way or they’ve experienced something that’s heartbreaking, a failure or a rupture or a disappointment with humanity. But I wanna know from you, what do you think when you’ve come into contact with someone who has previously been labeled kind of depressed and the different ways of looking at it?
Claudia: What you were saying was sort of this idea of like ancestral trauma that doesn’t have words, that you might not know has been happening all along.
For example, in my personal case, the experience of how depression shows up in men, even the men in my family and not knowing, like as irritability and not knowing that this was passed down because they were immigrants, because of a more strict parenting, for example, that included maybe hitting or demeaning. And so depression in males, which is really tricky to spot sometimes, and it’s non-verbal, how does it show up? So if we expand it to like, we’re not gonna call this depression, we’re gonna look at it from a different intuitive way.
Julie: More expansive, right?
Claudia: Yes, more expansive. One of the ways that I approach apathy and depression is, this is gonna sound bizarre, but I use this a lot in dynamic meditation. And I find that the people who’ve done dynamic meditation with me, it really loosens them up.
And I just talk about it mechanically. I say, all right, let’s just look at the mechanics here. And what happens is there’s some really fun, really frozen energy.
So the way that I apply it is like through physics, this idea that we look at our feelings through an energetic scale. So the denser the feelings, like depression, let’s say, let’s say, or apathy versus fear, which has more energetic move. I always say like, there’s more bubbles moving, even anger.
Anger has a lot of bubbles. I always say anger starts revolutions. That’s how much, how many bubbles are going on.
Like this idea that we are applying it as an energetic scale that you move up. As you get lighter, you move up and every feeling has its own calibration energetically. And once a client can get a hold of that, like, oh, I’m gonna look at this mechanically.
I’m gonna look at it as like maybe a denser energetic place I’m in versus, oh, I’m just a depressed person.
Julie: Yes, I love that.
Claudia: Do you get that?
Julie: Well, but that gives the opening for movement. I’ve never said it that way, but I love it.
Claudia: Can you see it?
Julie: Yes, like maybe even an at this moment, I’m a denser, what was the term you used? A denser.
Claudia: Energetic scale, like you’re in it.
Julie: Yeah, I love it.
Claudia: So if, again, it brings this sort of, let’s not look at it judgmentally. Let’s not.
Julie: Don’t put it in a box, right? It’s got a scale. Scale, even that word means there’s kind of a lighter scale and there’s a heavier scale.
Claudia: Exactly.
And if you can add a visual, if you can add a visual of like, as we move up the scale, so let’s say we move into grief because even grief has way more movement than apathy, right? Like there’s, right? Like, at least we’re crying. At least we’re walking the floors, going back and forth, right? At least there’s movement.
At least like as we’re moving up the energetic scale, we have more movement and it makes perfect sense in terms of emotion. So if we just chart emotions as energies and it makes sense when, for example, when I explain it to people, and this was the other thing I wrote down. I wrote down intuition, like part of being, I find that being trauma-informed is to be really connected to our own intuition as to what’s happening, but also just educating.
Educating. I know that when I know more about myself or when you talk to me, for example, about post-traumatic growth, which I call trauma-rising, right? But when you talk to me about it, I was like, whoa. Again, the use of words and language, like it’s just so beautiful.
Imagine post-traumatic growth. Oh my gosh, it’s such a beautiful phrase, right? Post-traumatic growth. It means that we can move out of the box.
Julie: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, out of the box. I love that.
Claudia: So there’s something about educating, about saying, okay, let’s just approach this mechanically.
You’re at a very dense part of this energetic scale at the bottom. It makes sense…
Julie: At this moment.
Claudia: At this moment. How beautiful is that?
Julie: And it changes everything, doesn’t it?
Claudia: It does.
Claudia’s Dynamic R-Evolution Curriculum
Julie: But there’s a way out, and I wanna get to that because we promised. People who listen till the end can hear more about your dynamic re-evolution curriculum because I know you are all about helping people move into a more flowing, fluid state, and I don’t know if this is true, but this is how I know you.
My guess is when they do that, they get to experience heaven on earth more often in their day-to-day. They do, they do.
1. Dynamic Meditation
Claudia: So my curriculum is based, it’s like four parts, basically, okay? So the first part is…
Julie: Take out your pen and paper, everybody.
Exactly, the dynamic meditation method because it starts with the self. So if we wanna use, I guess, professional language, it’s a self-healing, emotional regulation system, but it’s portable and practical. It’s on the go because I know that my post-trauma folks, my high-anxiety folks, labels, but just for the sake of this, anytime they hear the word meditation, they wanna run.
They’re like, there’s no way I’m sitting down and being alone with my unsupervised mind, basically.
Julie: Even though running can be a form of meditation.
Claudia: 100%, 100%.
And that’s what I talk about. Listen, you’re meditating all the time. You just don’t know it.
So dynamic meditation starts with the individual, with the self, with healing yourself. I call it heal yourself, heal the planet.
2. Wealth From Within
And then I also provide, and this comes after or alongside or parallel wealth from within.
And again, the tagline to that is inner journey, outer abundance. And that’s where we start working on mindset.
And we believe in holistic healing and we believe in doing it together as a community because how do we regulate with others, right? That’s part of the idea of wealth from within is, and to start noticing how wealthy we are. And that requires though having a foundational experience of being able to self-regulate, calm the central nervous system, emotionally regulate. So that’s why dynamic meditation method comes first or parallel to wealth from within.
3. Empath Leader
Pretty much after though, wealth from within comes after. And then I start going, if you wanna look at a funnel like this, I created something called the Empath Leader Training, which is much more high level. It’s for people like you. I want to invite you Julie.
You know after the pandemic I feel like the planet needs secure parenting. We need some secure parenting. It’s almost like the planet is running a muck. There are no parents in the house and the kids are just like… There is a lot of chaos right now and so I really feel like the planet needs some secure parenting. So it’s high-level empaths who have done a ton of healing work because they have the characteristics of being amazing leaders: Collaboration, cooperation, communing, building community, care, and competence, the high-level empath is extremely competent.
So I it’s almost a call to Arms to like come on we the planet right now is needing a safe and stable home and the empath leader so I’m just I’m doing some of that work.
4. Heaven and Earth Podcast
Claudia: And then I end with the heaven on Earth podcast which is how do we thread together experiences of mindfulness of self-love of noticing the wealth that we live in every day through the planet through you. You’re one of my heaven on Earth experiences all the time.
So and I invite people who are ready because part of also by the time you’re ready to go on the podcast you’re feeling pretty good about yourself aren’t you like you you’re showing up and I always say people it’s not showing off it’s showing up with your giftedness to the world. It’s like graduation if you’re on the if you’re on the heaven on Earth podcast you are graduating into self-love, into showing up and being your full self.
Julie: I love that
Claudia: We’re ready to do it so those are things
Listen to all those juicy morsels and this whole progression it’s awesome what you’re doing and I so appreciate you giving your time to us. Here on the view we’re working so hard to redefine mental health.
Claudia: I’m in your corner. I’m in your corner. I want people who are watching this to know that my backup is the Viva Center because people are not just trauma-informed. Pretty much everyone there is an expert on what they do and on trauma and on all the other labels but also because you’re using a lot of cutting edge modalities and this is what’s most important to me. And to why I refer to the Viva Center is because you as a group are always doing work on yourselves you really are.
Julie: We’re humans too we need lots of work. Thank you so much Claudia. I appreciate it so. I just want to say thank you for tuning in we hope you enjoyed our Deep dive into depression today and lots of other amazing topics be sure to check out all of Claudia’s resources.
Join us next month as we go into our next Deep dive to redefine mental health.