Meet Danielle Harel

My personal journey

I was born joyful, bright, alive, and full of energy. I walked and talked before I was a year old.

As hardworking immigrants in a new country, my parents desperately wanted to help me succeed. That came with a lot of anxiety, hovering, and corrections. So the bubbly little girl soon began to learn that maybe being me wasn’t quite right; that I needed to constantly adjust and fix myself.

My body, and the way I looked and moved, became the biggest focus of correction and criticism. Slowly, that bubbly little girl, with her endless energy and joy, went into hiding.

Sometimes when I look at very early photos of myself, like this one, my heart breaks a little. I can see how shame had already begun to shape me. My little body frozen in an intuitive, protective way: if I don’t move, I won’t be corrected.

Growing up, my connection with my body was constantly interrupted by the message that my body wasn’t the right size. It made me feel like something about me simply wasn’t right.

And yet, strangely enough, my connection to my sexuality remained untainted.

Because sexuality was private, it was one area of my life where no one was watching, correcting, or controlling me. It became a place where I could explore freely. The erotic playground became a source of freedom, empowerment, and joy rather than shame. It was a place where my full internal force could come alive.

And oh boy do I have internal force.

No wonder I felt drawn to the field of sexuality.

But when it came time for college, that field wasn’t yet widely available or accessible, so I turned to psychology instead. As I dove into that world, my own personal growth deepened alongside my studies.

Over time, I came to believe that the most essential tool in my line of work is me. By doing my own inner work, learning who I am from the inside out, and growing my relationship with myself, I learned about the process of growth – including the ups and downs, the pace, and the readiness and determination that was needed.

Meanwhile, I got married and had two amazing children.

My husband and I are both freedom seekers. We love exploring life and different experiences, so we opened our relationship. Why not also explore the freedom of love and sex?

Once we opened our relationship, something unexpected happened. I began receiving consistent, repeated positive feedback about how attractive I was, and that feedback was reinforced with pleasure and connection. My self image started to shift, and I began to feel deeply empowered. It was amazing to face different mirrors than the ones I grew up with.

Over time, I found I was ready to shout from the rooftops what I had always known deep down but had largely kept private: pleasure is extraordinary and so healing. I couldn’t hold back any longer. My dream of becoming a sexologist showed up with full force. Integrating that truth into my career felt like the most natural next step, so I went back to school and earned my PhD in Human Sexuality.

In one of my PhD trainings, I met Celeste. We were immediately drawn to each other. And while we were as different as two people can be, we shared the same philosophy and vision for how people change – and how we can help them experience more love, joy, intimacy, and satisfying sexuality. That’s how Somatica was born.

I was finishing my PhD, building Somatica, and raising two young children all at once. It was a season of creation in every direction, but parenting asked something different of me than anything I knew before. It taught me how to use a very natural part of myself in service of my relationship with my children. I learned how understanding the language of the limbic system could help me connect with my children through their most difficult times.

My kids taught me about the logic of our emotional, limbic brain. They could not always articulate what they needed, but they were always telling me. In their tears, their reaching for me, their meltdowns. They taught me to trust that they know and their body intuitively knows. That meltdowns are a way to shake the daily accumulation of tension and upset, and that clinging is a bid for connection and love. As I started to listen more and more deeply, I got to experience the amazing rewards of the deep intimacy and attachment that are built along the way.

This inspired a big part of Somatica – working with the inner child, understanding how to heal, listening and becoming a secure attachment person to our clients.

Creating and teaching Somatica also had a profound impact on my relationship with shame. I spent many years under the spell of shame and I wasn’t even aware of it.

As I was supporting and deshamifying my clients desires, longings and wounds, teaching about working with shame, and seeing a therapist myself, my own shame started to melt. I realized that true self-love doesn’t come from demanding that I change, but from expanding my capacity for self-acceptance and self love. My body started to come out of its freeze, I started to feel comfortable showing myself out in ways that I couldn’t before, and all that inner joy, creativity, and laughter started to just flow out of me.

This transformation played a huge role in how shame-free and natural I felt as a lead sexologist and co-executive producer on the award-winning show Virgin Island, the UK Channel 4 docu-reality where I bring Somatica’s transformational tools to the screen. It was so satisfying to help these brave young people feel more confident in their bodies, and to support them in finding more self-acceptance.

One of the things I love in Somatica and find most impactful as I teach and coach is that we made it a point to humanize and deshamify the human experience. It creates space for our erotic intelligence, coping strategies, humor, and deep, persistent movement toward more agency and freedom.

Today, I feel so much self-love and self acceptance, and yet, shame can knock on my door here and there, especially, when I feel over exposed. But, now I can recognize when I’m entering a shame spiral and resource myself when it happens. I reach out to others to come out of hiding and co-regulate. I let their love for me melt the shame away and allow the attachment relationship remind me who I really am.

People often ask me how I can be so joyful when someone is sharing the most painful truths about themselves. The answer is simple: I can see the opening.

When someone feels ashamed of who they are, or stuck in a story about what’s wrong with them, I light up. I know what’s missing, and I feel excited to help them discover it. I don’t believe growth has to be miserable or steeped in suffering. I believe it can be fueled by joy and pleasure. I believe there is something profoundly transformative about allowing what turns you on to guide how you live.

My turn ons, my aliveness and my desires fuel my life. They are my oracle and I plan to keep following them for as long as I live.