ABOUT MALACHI
Survivor • Practitioner • Researcher • Teacher
Malachi Gillihan is a trauma specialist, yogi, and spiritual counselor based in Berkeley, California, serving the East Bay and beyond. As a male survivor of child sexual trauma, Malachi has integrated his lived experience with PTSD and complex-PTSD with his studies in East-West approaches to trauma recovery, healing, and growth.
Having taught more than 1000 classes, in addition to writing and speaking about trauma recovery and spirituality, he maintains a small private practice, working with trauma survivors, teaching yoga and meditation, and leading retreats.
Malachi earned his Masters in East-West Psychology along with his certification as a Spiritual Counselor from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, CA, and is currently completing his PhD, focused on group-based interventions for survivors of sexual trauma.
He has trained under teachers including Dr. Dan Siegel, Judith Lasater, Sean Feit-Oakes, Deb Dana, and Michael Brian Baker in areas including yoga instruction and yoga for trauma, interpersonal neurobiology, the Polyvagal Theory, mindfulness-based stress reduction, Buddhist approaches to counseling, breathwork, and insight meditation. Malachi has been practicing yoga and meditation for 20 years.
MY STORY AS A SURVIVOR.
Like many folks drawn to the healing professions, research is me-search. I’ve lived for more than 30 years with post-traumatic stress and what’s now referred to as complex trauma or C-PTSD. As a survivor, I was looking for support, I was looking for The Thing that could help me recover my sense of safety, my sense of innocence and wholeness, my sense of agency and power and choice. I thankfully survived the more desperate and destructive avenues I tried in my younger years.
Over the first 20+ years of my adulthood, I mostly used talk therapy to help with my search for recovery and healing, but it didn’t really do more than help me cope with my feelings, behaviors, and compulsions. A major life pivot occurred when a friend suggested I read the book The Untethered Soul. Through that book, a series of events unfolded that led me to what is called integral and transpersonal therapy and counseling, along with various trauma theories, including somatic and body-mind approaches, all of which were the key to unlocking the transformation I had been seeking.
When I work with clients, conduct research, write and teach, I always have that direct experience to draw on. I know what it’s like to survive the unmentionable, what it’s like to live with anxiety so crippling I couldn’t get to work, to have panic attacks about having panic attacks, to feel so desperate to feel better it seemed impossible.
I know what it’s like to learn about the nervous system, and through that learning to release shame I had carried for years as I saw that how I was feeling didn’t mean I was broken or hopeless.
And I know what it’s like to have healing experiences so deep and profound that, as Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, when you have those experiences and look back, everything feels worth it somehow.
It’s hard to describe.
But when it happens, you know its truth.
MY METHOD AS A PRACTITIONER.
I have a small, private practice as a trauma specialist in which I see clients, mostly who are in some phase of trauma recovery and healing. Sometimes I’m their primary person, other times I’m providing some nervous system education or practices and tools their therapist wants me to teach them to support their work in sessions, such as helping with anxiety or depression.
Most of my sessions run 75 minutes, and in a typical session, we talk about issues and experiences, integrate body-mind practices such as yoga, guided meditations, mindfulness-based stress reduction, qigong and other approaches, along with psychoeducation (i.e., useful information about the nervous system that helps clients release shame about why they feel the way they do, and how they can use that information to get better).
The combination of theory, talking, and mindfulness, be it in movement or stillness, has a significant body of research behind it, suggesting it is an effective, integral treatment approach to effectively address issues ranging from anxiety, depression, panic attacks, sleep issues, chronic pain, digestive problems, ADHD, procrastination, relationship difficulties, troubles with intimacy and sexuality, compulsions and addictions.
MY dedication AS A teacher.
I have taught more than 1000 yoga classes, and continue to teach private sessions as well as supporting therapists with their clients in using mind-body approaches with the therapeutic process.
I do consults for cases, especially for clients with trauma histories, and develop and facilitate various workshops and trainings on subjects including sexual trauma recovery, yoga psychology, trauma theories, nervous system education, procrastination, and trauma and spirituality.
MY JOURNEY AS A RESEARCHER.
I’m currently a PhD candidate at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I am conducting a study evaluating a new, group-based treatment approach for male survivors of sexual trauma.
As a survivor myself, I designed an intervention that was an approach I was looking for but couldn’t find. The studies have given me a speciality within my trauma speciality of understanding both the direct experience of child sexual abuse, sexual assault and sexual trauma, while also having a sense of the range of research on the subject of sexual violence, and the many difficulties survivors encounter on the road to recovery.
While I am not always the right fit for some clients, I do have a broad understanding of different approaches that can be helpful, as well as a good network of healing professionals to refer to.
In addition, my research has also included East-West approaches for trauma more broadly and sexual trauma in particular. This has given me what some in the West might think of as alternative, non-pharma approaches for healing that many clients find deeply helpful.
I love supporting both clients and healing professionals in how best to approach trauma recovery and healing. Please reach out so we can connect.
TESTIMONIALS
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