Women In Wellness: Juliette Karaman On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadice
No phone in the morning. Instead of reaching for your phone first thing in the morning, reach for a journal and do a 5-minute brain dump. Automatic writing, getting all your thoughts and perhaps dreams out on paper helps you clear the clutter from your mind and looping in vindictive thoughts or limiting beliefs.
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Juliette Karaman.
Juliette Karaman is a coach, teacher, mentor, and writer on relationships, trauma, healing, sex, and intimacy. She specializes in how to move on from sexual trauma to rebuild an intimate relationship again, guiding her clients through carefully curated processes that restore trust and communication.
Merging her decade of conscious sexuality with the ability to hold deep space has her clients regain confidence in their bodies, psyche, and relationship to themselves. She also is a mother of 4, which, I believe adds a whole extra layer to her wisdom.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
I’m a mentor, coach, and writer on relationships, trauma, healing, sex, and intimacy. I specialize in the reinvention of the most intimate relationship in life, the one you have with yourself.
It took hitting rock bottom
for me to start building this relationship to myself. I spent 9 months in and out of the hospital, doctors did not know what was wrong with me. Only when I got out of a toxic relationship did the healing journey back to self-love start. All the things the psyche had kept hidden and buried for over 20 years started to bubble up again to be processed. After delving deep into the psyche I turned to conscious sexuality to understand what was happening inside my body, where trauma was stuck and kept me repeating destructive behavior.
Today I am a sexual trauma and incest survivor helping others who’ve gone through it. I help people to move on from sexual trauma to rebuild an intimate relationship again, regaining confidence in themselves and their bodies again. Through years of therapy, personal development, and a massive toolkit, I have created carefully curated processes that restore trust and communication and ultimately unlock the door to pleasure.
Alongside helping couples regain intimate relationships again, I trained and mentored hundreds of other coaches and therapists over the past decade to up-level their skills. I’ve founded Feel Fully You and the Embodied Leadership Academy which leads entrepreneurs, therapists, and coaches through their trauma helps to realign their nervous systems and re-ignite their sensuality so they can lead their teams and clients.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
I remember teaching a coaching program the week after my sister had passed away. I was nervous that I would not be able to get any words out when I got on stage. Of course, that is exactly what happened. I looked at the 120 coaches in training or so, and was silent, looking each of them in the eye as tears ran down my face, after having stated that my biggest fear was that I would not be able to relate to them. About 3 minutes passed, in which you could hear a pin drop. I received so much silent love from them all. The lesson I was meant to teach changed and it became about connection and how important it is to show authenticity and emotions as a leader.
Even now, 4 years on, I still have coaches tell me that this was one of the most impactful lessons they learned from that 6-month coaching program.
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
At the start of my career, I compared myself to so many other relationship therapists and coaches out there. Comparasitis I call it. All it does is highlight how different everyone is and that there is no ONE way of doing it the RIGHT way. I wanted to be authentic and learn everything there is to know about healing and helping people. The lesson is you don’t have to be the master in the room to help people. You will attract people who are going through what you have already gone through and you can help them with it. I do not regret getting a lot of different qualifications, because every client I work with is different and I have a lot of different tools to help her get the best results for her. There is NO ONE WAY of helping, be your authentic self and it will be the medicine that someone needs!
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
I help women and couples become emotionally intelligent, recognise their triggers and learn to respond to them, instead of following destructive reaction patterns. We bring dialogue and communication back to the table instead of allowing disconnect to create a rift between partner. Education about pleasure is the key. Trauma and how our nervous system “goes offline” is a massive piece of the puzzle. We often push emotions away instead of fully feeling them, for the fear of too much pain or emotional overwhelm. We hold on so tightly, to appear a certain way, we get stuck. Yet when we allow ourselves to FEEL (even if only for 90 seconds), the emotions, thoughts and body sensations move through. In Somatic Experiencing therapy they call this pendulation.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
1. Slow down!
Life is for living! Schedule in conscious time for yourself. This may include the below exercise to set a timer 3 times a day and check-in with yourself.
2. No phone in the morning.
Instead of reaching for your phone first thing in the morning, reach for a journal and do a 5-minute brain dump. Automatic writing, getting all your thoughts and perhaps dreams out on paper helps you clear the clutter from your mind and looping in vindictive thoughts or limiting beliefs.
3. Schedule conscious time with your partner.
Agree on the time and date, organize child care, put your phone away and really connect. Agree not to speak about the kids, jobs or whatever stresses that are going on in your life. Do something out of the ordinary: i.e. if you usually go out to dinner, perhaps go kite flying or go-karting together. A good way to find out what you both might like is to write lists about the things you loved to do as kids and then share them with each other on your conscious together time. Schedule this at least once or twice a month!
4. Make a live list.
What are 20 achievable things that you want to experience over the next 12 months.
For example:
1- Girls dinner out
2-Buy myself flowers
3-Take a luscious bath with candlelight and bath salt
4-Go for a walk in nature by myself
5-Moonlight picnic in nature
6-Coffee in bed
7- Sky diving
8-Dance naked in the living room
9-Take a burlesque class
10- Learn a new language
11-Adult PJ dinner party
12-Book a weekend abroad with only your partner
The world is your oyster and just have fun with these. Every time you have done one, celebrate and tick them off the list. You are creating new neural pathways, and training your psyche to receive more!
5. Make gratitude a habit
At the dinner table, have everyone say 3 things they are grateful for that the day has brought them. Followed by 2 qualities they love about themselves. Yes, every day these need to be new ones!
If you have no family, this is a good one to do before bed at night and to write them in a journal, each day reading the list of gratitudes and qualities that have been written down before. Again this retrains the mind to see all the positive things in our lives and attract more of the same!
For example:
I am grateful for the storm yesterday and the electricity cut because it gave me time to take a bath and meditate.
I am grateful for the way you look at me first thing in the morning and reach out to stroke my shoulder, it has me feel loved and cherished.
I am grateful for the man in the blue BMW for cutting me off, it gave me a chance to work with being annoyed and had me slow down enough to see the beautiful buds on the trees that were starting to flower.
I love that I am kind.
I love that I am a good listener and people feel they can share their feelings with me and feel safe to open up.
I love that I love so deeply and let those around me know in no uncertain way that I love them.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
All our experiences can be broken down into 4 elements:
Images, thoughts, emotions and body sensations.
I wish everyone took a moment to set a timer 3 times a day for 90 seconds only and to FEEL: Notice your breath, without trying to change it or move it. Notice what thoughts are coming up and feel them. Notice if there are any images that come to mind. Feel them. Notice any emotions and body sensations that come up. Feel them. More content will come up and again feel the 4 elements: Image, Thought, Emotion, and Sensation. After doing this for 30 days, you will notice you have fewer looping thoughts and are so much more in touch with your body.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
1. Stop trying to please everyone, and take care of yourself first.
2. No is a full sentence! You don’t have to explain why you don’t want to do something.
3. Setting boundaries is important in ALL relationships, including your kids! It helps guide them to how to be with you and helps you be the best version of yourself.
4. Stay curious. You never know what is going on for others, judging others is so easy, yet showing empathy is so healing.
5. Use conscious communication to understand the other person. So often we listen, ready to interject with our answer or our opinion, not really understanding what has been communicated.
Even if you do not like or agree with the communication, a simple “thank you” will suffice and show that you have understood.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
Although I think all are very important, mental health is massively important to me. Some of my family members have suffered from depression and I have had friends commit suicide because they saw no other way out. Suicide and depression is on the uptake in teenagers and young adults for the past 5 years. One of the students of the organization committed suicide and this had such an impact on me that I re-trained and became very trauma aware. I work with both the parents of suicide victims and young adults who have attempted to commit suicide. The pain I see is so real and by using different processes and techniques, so much of this can be alleviated and they can start living a somewhat normal life again. I think it is imperative for coaches and therapists to be able to spot when someone is depressed and possibly suicidal and to get the extra help needed to help them.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
Women In Wellness: Juliette Karaman On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.