March 26, 2025 • 45 mins
The word trauma is everywhere these days, but how do you know if you’re actually dealing with trauma—or just going through a rough patch? Kelly sits down with Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner Brittany Piper to break it all down, including why traditional talk therapy often isn’t enough to fully heal.
Brittany explains how trauma is stored in the body, not just the brain, and why talking about it can only take you so far. In her new book, Body-First Healing: A Revolutionary Guide to Nervous System Recovery, she shares science-backed somatic practices—that help release stored trauma and reset the nervous system.
They also dive into big questions: Do we all have trauma, or has the term become overused? Have we become an emotionally weak society, or are we just finally paying attention? And in a world that constantly keeps us in chronic stress, what can we actually do to bring our nervous systems back to balance?
Book: Body-First Healing: A Revolutionary Guide to Nervous System Recovery
Socials: @healwithbritt
Website: bodyfirsthealing.com
HOST: Kelly Henderson // @velvetsedge // velvetsedge.com
Follow Velvet's Edge on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/velvetsedge/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Conversations on life, style, beauty, and relationships. It's The Velvet's
Edge Podcast with Kelly Henderson.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Brittany Tiper is a somatic experiencing practitioner. She has a
new book coming out, Body First Healing, a revolutionary guide
to nervous system recovery. Hi Brittany, Hi, Hi, thank you
so much for being here.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
We were talking a little bit before. I told you.
My listeners are very accustomed to the trauma conversation. But
I love what you're doing and what you're talking about
in this book because I do think it's really helpful
to break down what trauma is, how it happens, and
then what it can look like in your life, and
then how to kind of deal with that, because I
know one of your biggest points is that talk therapy
(00:47):
sometimes just isn't enough when you're dealing with intense trauma.
So I wanted to start by just maybe telling listeners,
like one of the questions I get asked by people
a lot is, well, how do I know if this
is a traumatic of event or if I'm just going
through a hard time, Like, how do we differentiate those
two things?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
So, working in the somatic world, you know soma means
of the body, so we focus a lot on healing
trauma through body and more specifically, though in sematic experiencing,
we really focus on the nervous system. So our definition
of trauma is that it's any event or experience that
(01:26):
overwhelms the nervous system's capacity to cope. And when that happens,
you can get, you know, seemingly stuck in a survival response,
so fight, flight, shut down, freeze, fawn, and functional freeze.
And I use analogies a lot just as a way
to really simplify this work. So I always tell people
imagine that it's like armor that your nervous system puts on.
(01:49):
It's like, Okay, we're going to armor up to protect
you from this event, this experience. But what can happen
is that it turns into like this night suit of
armor and it stays on even after after the event
or the experience is over. And that's usually due to
a lack of safety following the event or the experience,
or because your nervous system isn't quite developed enough yet
(02:10):
to be able to come back to safety, back to
baseline and regulation. And that's where a lot of developmental trauma,
you know, kind of occurs, and so then we get
kind of stuck carrying around and wearing this like night
suit of armor that starts. You know, at one point
it was self protective, but now it feels self sabotaging.
It's getting in the way of our life. It's heavy,
it's annoying, it doesn't feel like us. We start to
(02:32):
lose sight of who we are. And so I think
back to your question, what is trauma. It's gonna be
so relative to the nervous system that it happens too.
And I can give an example, and I share this
example in the book. So let's say that you got
Freddy and Johnny right. They're neighbors, they're eight years old,
they live on the same street, they go to the
(02:54):
same school. Freddy comes from a house where caregivers are present.
They're really attuned to his need. They also have regulated
nervous systems, so they welcome and discomfort. They allow for
emotional expression, and it just feels like a safe environment
for him to be himself, to express. Whereas Johnny, on
the other hand, he comes from an environment where one
(03:15):
of the caregivers is maybe not around because they are
working all the time, or you know, maybe there's there's separation,
whatever that is. And then the other caregiver, who is
physically present, is not mentally or emotionally present. Maybe they're
dealing with substance abuse or you know, something like that,
and so they're not regulated in their system, which doesn't
allow for his nervous system to really like regulate into
(03:38):
that safety. So it feels like a really tense environment.
He can't express himself authentically. And so anyways, these two kiddos,
they go to school one day, they get bullied in
the same way by the same bully on the bus,
same word said, same punch is thrown, and they're both
obviously armored up right, they're like kind of shocked, Oh
(03:58):
my gosh, what just happened. So Freddy goes home or Johnny,
I can't remember. Freddie goes home to an environment that
feels supportive. Both caregivers are there, They listen to them,
They help him regulate by they loan him their calm
and regulated nervous system so that he can start to
take that armor off. They listen to him, they allow
(04:19):
him to express whatever he's feeling. And then they say,
we're going to go to the principal tomorrow, we're going
to make sure this never happens again. He feels safe
enough to remove the armor, whereas the other child goes
home to an environment where one parent's gone again and
the other one is asleep on the couch, passed out.
And when he goes to wake up that parent, they're
clearly impered or intoxicated, and they yell at him and
(04:41):
they scold him, and they say, I don't have time
to deal with your stuff. Go to your room and
deal with it on your own. And so he remains
armored up. And so what you have here, and this
is where I don't love using the terminology of big
tea little ta trauma. Yeah, is you know Freddy or Johnny,
whichever one I mentioned, who goes home to the safe environment,
He might look back at this moment as like a
(05:02):
blip in the radar, whereas the other will look back
as this was a traumatic moment in my life. And
so really, what we often say is that trauma is
not found in the story or the event. It's found
in the nervous system and the nervous system's ability to
move through that or not move through that.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Okay, that makes so much sense to me. And I
love the example of the two different situations but going
through the same experience, because I've found often in life
that I'll look at two people and they'll go through
the same situation and they have completely different reactions or responses.
One person it completely derails, and the other person seems like, wait,
(05:45):
that wasn't that big of a deal, So why is
this impacting.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
You so much?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Over time? Does that build up or can that build
up within our nervous system to then make things that
happen later more impactful if maybe we'd didn't have all
that things built up.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
When your nervous system goes into a survival response, which
is those those states that I listed fight, flight, shut down,
and so on, there's something that happens within the body,
within your physiology. So adrenalin in cortisol is released into
the body to mobilize you. These are your mobilizing stress
hormones to mobilize you to fight or flee. And what
(06:22):
happens is if fighting or fleeing is not an option
or from an emotional perspective, we don't allow anger, which
is our fight emotional response, or we don't allow fear
and anxiety and worry, which is the flight emotional response.
If we push those down, then what happens is that
adrenaline in cortisol gets suppressed or essentially what we call
(06:45):
stuck within the system, and over time, those stress hormones
that the body is only built to metabolize through short
periods of time, when they get stuck, it turns into
chronic stress, which then turns into yeah, then chron mental, physical,
emotional health problems. But again another analogy. I love analogies.
(07:06):
You can think of like a pressure cooker, and what
you're talking about here is like you have this pressure
cooker of stress hormones and survival hormones that have been
built up over time. We call this allostatic load. And
if we haven't had the opportunity or the chance to
really process those experiences and to remove or express or
(07:26):
what we call discharge that adrenaline cortisol from the body,
then what happens is the smallest things, because our pressure
cooker is so full, are going to really activate us
and can feel more intense. And so that's like, you know,
the pressure cooker either explodes, which is like now we're
lashing out at people, we have rage, we're violent, we're
(07:46):
angry all the time and we're just irritated by life,
or we explode in the sense of flight, which is
like panic attacks, worry anxiety attacks. So we either explode
or we plode. And fload is more of that shutdown
or that freeze response, where now we're in depression, we're
in chronic fatigue, we're in burnout. And so I see
(08:09):
both of those in my practice, and that's usually the
accumulation of stress, chronic stress from usually unresolved trauma that's
built up over time.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It also would make sense to me why we saw
so much start happening maybe externally as far as people
fighting or losing it or mental health breakdowns after the pandemic,
because it was almost like we were all collectively going
through something traumatic and so then anything additional maybe sent
us into the exact place that you're talking about exactly.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
It was like that for a lot of people. It
was a straw that broke the camel's back. And you know,
in my book The Body First Healing, there's a big
old chunk that talks about the pandemic and how I
really think, Yeah, how I feel like that was kind
of an awakening for a lot of people because we've
gotten so so good in our very modern world, you know,
fast paced modern world of being really detached from anything
(09:04):
necked down yep, And we have all of these wonderful
behaviors in these you know, I'm gonna use air quotes
trauma responses of you know, overworking, overachieving, avoiding, running away,
you know, fawning people, pleasing, and so these are great
distractions from trauma. But really it is is it's just
(09:25):
stress being dressed up in a different way and used
in a different way. But it's these states, the same
stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol. They're just seeking and
trying to find someplace to you know, be be experienced.
And so people had to sit in isolation and I
feel like, come face to face and quarantine with their pain,
(09:46):
like there's nothing you can do to run from this now.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
So and you're not getting the validation because the things
you described are so praised in our society, and so
you wouldn't necessarily associate that with stress or trauma or
anything bad, even if that's what your body was feeling.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, exactly. And I share a lot about this nervous
system state called functional freeze. It's a blended state. I
feel like a lot of us are experiencing this right now.
But you know, the nervous system has a couple of
different primary states. So that is, you know, your rest
and digest, which is what we call ventral. And I
always like using the nervous system ladder for people to visualize.
(10:26):
I am a somatic experiencing practitioner, but I'm trained in
a lot of other modalities as well, and one of
them is called Polyvagel theory, and so that's the newest
kind of the upgraded science of the nervous system. But
porgis Stephen Porges who developed the theory. He created something
called the Polyvagel or the nervous system ladder, to illustrate
what the nervous system looks like. So it's a ladder
(10:48):
with three sections. So at the top, you're like in
rest and digest, which is what we call ventral, your
ventral bag state. It's your state of safety and connection.
But when you're activated in other words, triggered. Okay, when
our system is triggered or activated, we come down that
ladder and in the middle that section is fight or flight.
(11:09):
That's your sympathetic response. This is where the adrenaline cortisol
comes into the body. And if fighting or fleeing again
isn't an option, or we suppress the anger and fear,
which you're really good at, then we end up at
the bottom of the ladder, which is our dorsal vagel state,
otherwise known as shut down. It's kind of like freeze,
but freeze is more funded state. But it's important to
(11:30):
know that again, just like that pressure cooker, when you're
down in dorsal, which is not your state of mobilization,
this is your state of immobilization, you still have all
that adrenaline cord is al still trapped within the system.
So to come back up into regulation, you have to
move back up through fight or flight to discharge that.
And I also want to add people would assume that
(11:52):
regulation means being at the top of the ladder all
day long, but regulation is actually like a healthy bio
rhythm is being able to go up and down that
ladder roughly one hundred times a day, a hundred times yep, yep.
So even like stressful moments like yeah, and it can
be micro moments. So for instance, when you and I
(12:12):
were getting on and you were pulling up your notes
and then yeah, I was rushing to put on some
lip cloths and I'm like, oh my gosh, I have
to brush my hair. Yeah, I was experiencing stress and activation. Right,
So these are little moments that we don't notice. Some
of them are you know, think of like like waves.
Some of them are small, and then some of them
are bigger. So anyways, regulation is not staying at the top.
(12:34):
A regulated nervous system was what we call a flexible
nervous system, one that moves up and down the ladder
with fluidity. The reason I'm sharing this is because I
feel like it just gives a really good visualization for
you know, the nervous system. But also this functional free
state that we're talking about isn't one of those primary
states on the ladder. It is what we call a
blended state, so it's a mixed state of a little
(12:57):
bit of this and a little bit of that. So
function freeze is a little bit of flight. So we
have that flight response, right, adrenaline, cortisol, mobilizing. Usually there's
maybe fear anxiety, but there's also a freeze. There's a
bit of a shut down response. And so what we
can think of as the functional free state is going
(13:18):
through the motions without emotion.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Oh okay, Yeah, And as.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
You were saying, what it looks like on the outside
is like wow, like they're just strong, or like they just.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Handling all that.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Yeah, they handle it so well, or they're so right now,
what is it? Like? Hashtag unbothered they're so unbothered by things.
But it's really just a defense mechanism of shutting down
or dissociating from the somatic parts of us our emotions,
our sensations, our feelings, and so part of us still
kind of stays tethered down in the bottom parts of
(13:53):
that that ladder. And that also means that we might
show up in relationships with very little emotion or have
a hard I'm handling other people's emotions. But that also
means that we are dimming down the emotions that feel
good too, you know, so like we're kind of just
on autopilot and we're not really living. We really are
just surviving. So I think a lot of people are
(14:14):
there right now without maybe even even recognizing it.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, as you just said, the part about not experiencing
the good feelings too, I could immediately think of so
many situations where I was seeing that where you're going,
How have you gone through all this stuff and so
such a short amount of time and you're still alive
and functioning. But like you said, maybe they're not happy
or even presenting happy. It's almost like a going through
(14:40):
the motions kind of thing. Yeah, and it looks like, Wow,
that's kind of crazy, and that's impressive. But ultimately, if
you really kind of analyze what's happening, it's not happiness.
It's not joy, it's not ease or comfort. I'm curious
if we are suppressing all that cortisol but it's still
in our box bodies, what does that end that manifesting into,
(15:04):
Like it can't it has to do something right if
it's still sitting in your body.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yeah, there is a very very very strong correlation between
emotional suppression and disease and illness. There is a very
very very strong correlation between emotional suppression and disease and illness. Okay,
(15:34):
so the adrenaline cortisol is still it's still there and
it's still being used, and you can see this show
up in the body, in our musculo skeletal system, you
can see it in our viscera, in our joints, in
our fluid system. It affects our endocrine system, our hormones,
our cardiovascular system. Right, So you'll notice that when someone
(15:56):
has increased chronic stress, they usually have increase inflammation. How
that show ups in the viscera is I might have
digestive issues, ibs, gut issues. How that shows up in
the body and the musculoskeletal system is they might have
chronic pain and certain pain points so TMJ migrains, shoulder tension,
(16:18):
back pain. You might notice that from an emotional perspective,
this shows up as anxiety depression, you know, OCD, phobias,
and there's some of the research out there is you know,
autoimmune disease. So, for instance, when you're in this place
of chronic survival, all of those other kind of organ
(16:38):
systems that I just talked about and then some they're
all put on the back burner because survival is most important, right,
And so everything gets disrupted and everything is governed by
the state of the nervous system. If we're in a
state of rest and digest if we're in a state
of presence and safety and connection, then every kind of
(17:00):
operates fine, and the nervous system operates from the brain stem,
which governs which is you know, the neck and the
cerebellum here at the bottom of the brain. But this
is like the orchestrator of the body. So when the
nervous system, though, is in survival mode, everything about those
systems I talked about changes. So our heart rate is different.
(17:21):
Our blood motility, for instance, is different. So like when
we're in a state of rest and digest we have
a regular regulated circulation, but when we go into a
fight or flight response, our blood motility goes to our limbs.
And that's why we feel when we're anxious that we're
like really fidgety, or we're moving around all we're eating,
we're hot, or we're sweating. When we go into shut down,
(17:44):
it goes opposite. So the blood motility and circulation gets
we're kind of in a hibernation state, so that goes
to the core and that's why we have very little
circulation and we're cold, you know, when we're in these states.
So anyways, it increases our likelihood or you know, cardiovascular
autoimmune diseases, and a lot of that is because again
(18:05):
the body is working in priority for survival, not in
priority of rest and recover and you know homeostasis if
you will.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, well, I think we're getting a picture of some
of the work and in what the topics of this
book are about. And I want to dive into more
of that in a minute, but I want to give
the listeners a little bit of a backstory of you,
because I know you're not just a practitioner of these things,
you've actually lived them yourself. Can you talk through a
little bit about just what your life looked like that
(18:35):
led you to the understanding of like, talk therapy isn't
going to be enough for me on this one, and
I need to maybe take some different steps. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
So I didn't realize it until I got into more
somatic work, but looking back now, I know where everything
kind of started for me. So at birth, I was
actually I was taken from my mother forcibly, taken from
my mom and put into foster care because there was
methanphetamine found in our system. And I was reunited with
her after a few months when she seemingly got her
(19:06):
life back on track. But that really set the foundation
for my nervous system. Sure, and when we work with sematics,
you know a lot of what we're working with is
body memory. Again, it doesn't come back necessarily. Trauma isn't
found in the body, I'm sorry. In the story, It's
found in the nervous system, and that shows up in
body or what we call implicit memory. So the ways
(19:28):
that we contract, the ways that our muscles, you know,
kind of clench when someone gives us a certain look,
the way that we chase, the way that we run away,
the way that we shut down. This is all muscle
memory that was usually learned in our first three years
of life, and body memory starts forming at seven weeks
in the womb. And so I know that when my
(19:49):
mom was pregnant with me, she was going through very
traumatic time. She was homeless, living off of food stamps.
Her and my brother slept in her car, and obviously
my first few months in the world, I was separated
from her, and it was a really pivotal time, you know,
in infancy. And so anyways, that kind of started the
patterns of really intense anxiety around relationships, this fear of abandonment,
(20:13):
this feeling of I'm not enough of you know, feeling
of unworthiness. And I then lost my brother when we
were in high school. He was killed in a car accident.
My older brother, Dominic, and I kind of grew up
in an environment where you take all the hard stuff
and you just toss it under the rug, right like
out of sight, out of mind, And we were very
(20:36):
much so that family that just muscled through, and you
just my mom's not a very emotional person. I know why.
I learned a lot about her and writing this book,
and we had some really long, overdue but also very
healing conversations in the pursuit of creating this book. But
that was the template that was given to me, is
(20:57):
when times are tough, you just muscle through. And I
was very dissociated for a lot of my upbringing, didn't
really know what emotions were, didn't know how to feel them.
And then when I was twenty, I was sexually assaulted
by a stranger who helped me change my flat tire.
And I work a lot in the sexual violence prevention
(21:18):
space now, so I've worked with survivors for many years,
both home and abroad, And what most survivors will tell
you is that there is the trauma of the event,
and then there's also the aftermathea and for a lot
of survivors, the aftermath can sometimes be more traumatic or
more debilitating, and that was my experience. They caught this man,
(21:42):
they apprehended him, and after the assault, there was a
two year trial process, which was really unforgiving and horrible
to have to go through. But our trial was postponed
or continued nine times. Nine times. And that's often like
a strategy that defense teams will use when they know
(22:04):
that they're, you know, the perpetrator doesn't have a case
to stand on. They'll postpone as a way to like
emotionally wear down the victims so that they will drop
the charges. And because every time that happens, you essentially
have to do a dress rehearsal for trial. You know,
you don't find out usually until the day before that
they're postponing, so you have to meet with your legal team.
(22:27):
I had to go through the depositions again. I had
to listen to my tape statements. I had to practice
being on the witness stand, which meant that like nine
times I had to relive every graphic detail of that
night and I'm even feeling my feeling, my breath, and
that was really hard. And what was interesting is that
what people saw on the outside. I remember people saying,
(22:49):
you're just you're really handling this so well, you know.
And even after he was sentenced, the trial finally happened,
he was sentenced to sixty years behind bar. Yes, And
I remember the day after the trial watching on the news,
the news anchors talking at the newsdesk about my case,
and one anchor said to another, he said, twenty years
(23:11):
of covering court trials, I've never seen a rape victim
who was this poist, this composed who was able to
look her rapist in the eye and said you did this,
and you're going to pay. And what people didn't know
is that I was in such a bad place that
I was completely dissociated and completely shut off from myself
and when people weren't around, what was happening behind the
(23:33):
scenes is that I was struggling with severe alcohol abuse,
eating disorders, suicidal ideation, pill addiction, and not even thirty
days after that sentencing, I actually ended up in a
jail cell myself. And I'll give quick context to that.
So I was at with my boyfriend who was drinking
and driving, and I always say, that's a really clear
(23:55):
picture of where I was at at the time in
my life. This was also like fifteen years ago. So
he was pulled over and arrested, and when the police
officers went to pull me out of the car, I
had a flashback of the night of my assault of
a man touching me in a car, and my nervous
system went back into a fight response. I had actually
(24:18):
originally tried to fight him off, but I was overpowered
so that I went into a freeze response. And so
again this was all that accumulated and trial and cortisol
that was trying to, you know, stick on to any
experience to get this out. And so I ended up
in a jail cell with two counts of battery on
an officer with injury. And I remember going before the
(24:40):
judge after a couple of days because my parents did
not bail me out. You know, this this tough love moment,
and she knew who I was. She said, I know
who you are from that sexual from the sexual assault case.
And she said, we're going to drop the charges. But
she said, but you need to learn to live with
your pain better, with your trauma better. And that was
(25:02):
kind of the turning point for me because she didn't
say get over it, get past it, which is what
I'm accustomed to, and so that's kind of where things changed.
I should also state that while I was in that
jail cell, there was no alcohol, no pills, no crappy relationships,
no distraction, there was nothing kind of like quarantine. I
was in a literal prison, and for a lot of people,
(25:24):
they felt like, you know, the pandemic was like a prison.
But I was forced to sit in isolation with this
decade's old grief and trauma and the things that were
never spoken and never talked about and therefore never felt
as well. And my body experienced something in those two
days that I had never experienced before. There was trembling,
(25:45):
there was shaking, There was a lot of sweating, a
lot of tears, and it felt almost like a purge.
And looking back now, I know that it was my
body just finally discharging a lot of you know, because
in my life, I know I ever gave myself time
to sit down and do nothing or to be in silence.
It terrified me, and so I got really curious about
(26:09):
why I felt so differently in my body. When I
left that experience, I felt very different, and I remember
talking to my therapist about it. I was seeing a
talk therapist at the time, and I had for years,
and she recommended maybe you start doing a little bit
of work with a somatic therapist. And so that was
back in twenty eleven, twenty twelve, and so that just
(26:29):
took me down the rabbit hole of you know, kind
of this body body first approach.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah, well you touched on something. This was going to
be my next question anyway. But when I hear the
part about you fighting the police officer, it's so interesting
how you literally ended up in a jail sale because
of your skills that kept you alive possibly in the
first situation, or they were used for an attempt at
survival when you were going through the actual assault. And
(26:56):
isn't that so often what happens to us. It's like
it's needed at the beginning, Like these tools that we
pick up or figure out as a kid to keep
ourselves alive end up being the thing that later comes
back to put us in either a literal jail or
a figurative jail. And I love that you also say
(27:17):
figuring out what those skill sets are for you isn't
a place of shame, Like that's the place to find
the biggest kind of compassion for yourself. So can you
talk through that a little bit, because I know in
my journey I used to really go to the shame
place first of like why do you do that? Or
you know, this is whatever, and it's like, no, that
actually served me for a long time, that skill set.
(27:38):
It helped me through very toxic situations or relationships or
whatever it was, and it kept me alive. It's just
not serving me anymore. And so even when it comes
up now, because it's not like you start this work
and you just figure it out and it gets perfect,
you know, but like when it comes up now, I
can go, oh, I'm just doing that thing again, or
what's happening in my body to like make me feel
(27:58):
so unsafe right now? It's actually an indicator for me.
But can you speak to that a little bit.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
I often refer to them as management strategies or survival patterns,
like these old patterns that we enlisted back then in
order to survive. They started off as self protective and
now they might becoming self destructive. And these management strategies,
it's like they just need a little bit of updating,
some rewiring because they're outdated. But in the book, the
(28:32):
body keeps the score. Bessel vander Kolk. He says, you
know that trauma comes back as a reaction, and that's
kind of what you're talking about here, is these reactions
are these impulses of the body. It's a certain kind
of body memory called procedural patterns or procedural memory, and
it's essentially the procedures that our body uses in order
(28:53):
to move through a distressing moment. You know, whether that
is you can see it in posture, the way that
we close down that we open up again, the fidgetiness.
But the question that you asked is like, what is
it that's going on inside that that's then causing the behavior, Right,
So those are the impulses that we work with to
(29:13):
try and create new memory, new responses. And one way
that I you know, you can kind of again go
back to like the whole night suit armor thing. Yeah,
people often think that like, Okay, this armor isn't serving
me anymore, it's getting in the way of my life,
it's sabotaging me. I need to do away with it.
And it's actually not about doing away with it. In
the book, I use that analogy and I said, imagine
(29:35):
that it's like you're taking that night suit of armor
and you're like melting it down into a shield. Like
we're not discarding it, We're just we're not being consumed
by it anymore. And in moments when we need it,
it's still there because it still has purpose, it still
has intention, And I think that that is such a
(29:55):
much more compassionate way of looking at it. And also
the shame thing too, I mean, yeah, I can definitely
feel that. I feel that for myself because not only
was I hardwired into shame from a very early age,
you know, that internalized belief of I am bad or
I am wrong, other my mom wouldn't have done this,
(30:16):
or my dad wouldn't have left me, or you know
all those stories that we tell. Working with the shame,
and this is where a lot of like the younger
child or the internal family system somatic parts work. We
do a lot in my Body First healing program and
when that comes up. Actually, there's a do you know
(30:36):
who doctor Russell Kennedy is the anxiety MD.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
No, I don't, but that sounds interesting to me.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
So he's a colleague of mine, but he's an author, neuroscientist,
he's a medical doctor, okay, and he wrote a book
on anxiety. But one time we were doing a workshop
together and he said, a trigger is just an emotional
age regression.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
We're good, yes, when are.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Triggered, when we're activated, we are just taken back in
time to this emotional stamp, this emotional younger version of ourself.
And so rather than being like, you know, scolding that
younger version of ourself, yeahing it, it's like, how can
we actually meet that version of ourselves with so much
more clarity, compassion, understanding and when that happens, and while
(31:23):
also at the same time creating new choices, new areas,
new reactions. So yeah, I just randomly thought about that.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
But well, and if you do it that way, I
mean a lot of times I think that's called reparenting yourself, right,
But you're giving your nervous system the thing that you
didn't get that has now created this whole survival skills,
coping mechanisms, whatever you want to call it, programming within you.
So it does actually work. I often go to my teenager,
(31:51):
I mean, and she is like very sassy, but that
was the that's the one that I would go to first,
or then my my inner child, Like the younger version
was more weepy and kind of just like wanted to
be held, you know, those kind of things. But the
things that I've learned about how simple actually the rewiring
can be. Once you start learning about this stuff and
(32:13):
doing the kind of practices that you're talking about. I mean,
it's changed my whole life, like the entire thing. But
I want to ask for the listeners who might be
hearing this and thinking, Okay, I'm identifying with what they're
talking about. I've maybe had some experiences. I'm starting to
see it manifest in my life, like they start doing
this work. But then we're also still living in this world,
(32:35):
you know, and there's a lot going on right now.
How do we keep ourselves from continuing to just add
trauma to the plate and like survive this kind of
world that we live in right now.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
So I think that first of all, reminding ourselves that
our biology is incredibly adaptable, Okay, incredibly like the cell.
And I know this is this maybe not woo woo,
but it's real science, right Our happiatics, the history of
ourselves has survived and resiliently made it through some of
(33:11):
the worst conditions of this world, and that is a
part of our makeup and I think sometimes we forget that, like,
the genetic inheritance that we have is remarkable, right, yeah,
and somatic experiencing it is a it's considered a naturalistic
trauma recovery modality. A lot of that is the word naturalistic,
(33:35):
is that what we're doing is instead of showing people
that external factors and resources that can help them heal,
we're turning people. We're kind of posturing them to turn
inward and be like, you actually have everything within you. You
have the capacity to heal on your own, to self heal.
You were actually wired for it. And so I know
(33:57):
that sounds very wishy washy and can be hard to
take in when you're like, my life just freaking sucks
right now, right, It's really hard. So I just want
to give people that encouragement. Is I think sometimes we
forget where we came from as a species and how
much we have endured and survived.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
For sure.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Yeah, really cool to think about. So the answer is
probably simpler than you might think. Okay, when you have
a nervous system that's stuck in survival survival mode, which
by the way, makes so much sense based on the
conditions of our world, the divisive political climates, the air
that we breathe, the food that we eat where you know,
(34:35):
like we live everything. Yeah, we live in a very
disconnected society. We are always on our phones. I mean,
it makes a lot of sense. And we're also taught
let's not be with our emotions, which makes things ten
times worse. Let's pretend like we're okay. So what do
you do if those are things that you can't really change?
So think of your nervous system and other analogies. Think
(34:55):
of it like a security system that is always working
in the background consciously, and it operates through the subconscious
brain and the body, more specifically, the senses it is
sensing into am I safe or am I not safe?
Safe or not safe? And this is called neuroception. This
is your brain's ability to detect or your body's ability
(35:17):
to detect for safety or threat without using your mind's awareness. Okay,
And this scanning, the security system is scanning in three
places internally in your body, so inside, externally, in your
outer environment, outside, and then between you and other nervous systems.
We call it inside outside between Okay, So internally that
might feel like, oh, what doesn't feel safe? Is that
(35:39):
my stomach is really upset right now, or my heart
is pounding out of my chest, or oh, what does
feel safe is I have access to breath, and my
diaphragm feels really nice and open, and I feel settled
in my seat. Right we're not thinking these things, but
these scans are happening, millions of scans per second, same
with your outer environments, with your internal So what can
(36:02):
happen is that when you become chronically dysregulated or stuck
in survival mode, it's like your nervous system is constantly
alarming for danger even if it might not be there,
or it's not alarming for danger even if it is present.
So what we can do is we can start to
intentionally scan for things that feel safe, So things that
(36:25):
don't feel safe for what we lovingly call triggers. Right
in the sematic space, we call it activation. Okay, we
don't use the word triggers, but what feels safe is
what we call glimmers, So things that deactivate the nervous
system or deactivate that alarm. And so when you start
to do like se work, for instance, the foundational work
(36:48):
that we do with the client is helping them to
build what we call that felt sense of safety. So
it's rewiring and teaching the body and the nervous system
instead of just scanning for danger all the time. Can
we scan for what might feel good, what might feel okay?
What and what not necessarily what brings you joy and gratitude,
Like what just brings a sense of okayness or like
(37:10):
betterness to you? And so something as simple as like
orienting what we call exploratory orienting, orienting with the sensory
motor system. It's using site, sound, smell, touch, taste as
a way to just explore your environment. And when you
do that, you actually slow down the nervous system, which
(37:31):
kind of counteracts some of that adrenaline and cortisol. You
start to become more present and you realize, wow, there's
actually cues, neuroceptive cues of safety all around me. Like
even right now, there's a mirror in front of me,
and I'm seeing the way that the window in the reflection,
the way that the light is on right here, and
I'm thinking to myself, wow, it's really beautiful outside.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah, it's a beautiful day.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
Yeah. But what's important is that as you're doing this
and as you're exploring, you also want to notice when
we call this track, how does that feel in your body?
So like, how is your body experiencing this? What small
shifts are you noticing? So you might notice like, oh,
my shoulder diaphragm just dropped, or the root or my
tongue just dropped open a little bit, or I feel
(38:15):
like i'm my heart rate is regulating, or oh, that's interesting,
my hands feel a little bit more neutral and warm
they were really cold earlier. I feel more present, or
maybe there's an emotional experience, And so we call it
kind of stupid simple because when people start the work.
The Body First Healing Book is based on the Body
First Healing Program, and it's a program I've had for
(38:37):
many years. But it's six months, and in the first
three months of the program, we actually don't even get
into people's trauma, yeah, which some people love and some
people hate. Some people are like, I want to get
to it now, but we don't do core wounds until
month three because the first three months we spend time
building this foundation for your nervous system in your body
to learn the language of what it feels like to
(39:01):
be present, what it feels like to be with your body,
which can feel really foreign, but you'll be surprised that
by just doing daily tracking every day, like taking just
ninety seconds to be like, what feels pleasant right now
for me? What can I notice?
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (39:18):
How is my body showing me that that consistent somatic
experience we say, the experience creates creates new evidence for
the body and the nervous system that Okay, I can
have moments where I feel safe and present, and that
evidence then creates new expectation. So experience creates evidence, which
then creates new expectation where when I'm out in the
(39:41):
world now it's like I'm expecting that I'm not going
to be triggered all the time, and we start to
look for safety subconsciously more rather than always being so
armored up.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Or believing their safety even Like that's an interesting and
so that's so interesting. You brought up tracking because when
you were describing the moment you had in jail, the
very first time I did somatic kind of work, the
first time they had me do tracking, it freaked me
out so much because it involved me having to be
present in my own environment and I didn't realize how
(40:14):
disassociated I actually was. Yeah, and that kind of it
was such an interesting experience because I almost like blacked
out but then would like cry and then it became
something that was a very helpful tool. But it was
almost like I had to reteach my body and nervous
system this is okay to be here now first ye,
(40:35):
which was crazy.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
And that's that's kind of the biggest stumbling block for
most people at the beginning is realizing like, oh, I
have a body and I'm allowed to be in.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
It, right, Like this thing that's connected to me all
the time, I'm actually not even living in it's.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Where you know. And then that's where we go into
like when we override, Like and I can ask the
the question to someone in the program of like how
does your body show you? Yes, how does your body
show you know? And they'll be like I don't know,
and I'm like, okay, So when you set a boundary,
how do you know that that that that's a boundary
that you want to set And they're like, wow, I
(41:13):
guess I don't set boundaries. I have a hard time, yeah.
Or we allow our boundaries to be overridden because we're
not in touch with and that's what intuition is, right,
Our intuition is part of our gut instinct, and that
is literally our body showing us what we want to prioritize,
our authentic wants and desires. I know there's so much
(41:36):
conversation right now around authenticity and like how do I
know if this is really me and really not? And
a lot of that starts with learning this somatic language.
And one of the things we didn't mention at the beginning,
but I think could be important here is when you
talk about like conventional like talking about our trauma versus
like the feeling part, there's what we know and then
(41:56):
there's what we feel, and oftentimes those are two very
different things. And so with the trauma work, what we're
doing and working with the nervous system is we're helping
the nervous system to catch up with what the mind
already knows. Right cognitive therapy, where we know, yes, the
trauma is over, we can we can we have that
perspective that this is something that happened in the past,
(42:18):
but the nervous system in the body doesn't feel that
way and it doesn't have cognition to really understand that.
And what's also important though to note is that we
have this great thing, this great thing. We have this
wonderful thing inside of us called the vagus nerve. I'm
sure you're familiar with it. It's really popular now, you know,
vagus nerve stimulation in order to regulate your nervous system.
(42:40):
But the polyvagal theory came from all of the study
of the vagus nerve, and the vagus nerve it's the
longest longest cranial nerve in the body, but it's a
bi directional nerve, so it sends information from the body
up to the brain and from the brain down to
the body, and it's known as the information super Highway.
(43:01):
And what's important to note is that eighty percent of
the messages of the vagus nerve go from the body
up to the brain and only twenty percent go from
the brain down to.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
The body, which means fascinating, yeah, Which means that the
body has a lot more say when it comes to
how we show.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Up, how we feel, how we respond relationships. Yet we
again are so detached from the body, which is I
think why a lot of people right now feel so
inauthentic or they're searching for authenticity or is this really
me so just random thing too? But when it comes
to intuition and authenticity and like what's good for me
and what's not. If you're just doing that from a
(43:41):
mindset perspective, you're really missing a lot of the conversation.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Well, and to go back to your point earlier about
how a lot of our society is based on us overworking, overstimulating,
doing these things to avoid the emotions and being in
the body. So if you want to be authentic, it's
almost like you got to do reverse of what we've
all been taught exactly. Really fascinating. Well, I mentioned the book.
(44:07):
The book is called Body First Healing, A Revolutionary Guide
to the Nervous System Recovery. It is out now, so
I will put a link in the description of this
podcast for you guys. But Brittany, if people want to
keep up with you or work with you in other capacities,
where would they find you?
Speaker 3 (44:21):
So they can find me on social media platforms that
heal with Britt with two Teas, I would say, it's
not like Britney Spears help britt with two teas. And
if you want to learn more about the book or
working with me or joining the Body First Healing program,
you can just go to Bodyfirst healing dot Com.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Amazing. I will put that also in the description of
this podcast for you guys. Thank you so much for
being here. I loved this conversation.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
Thank you I did too.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Thanks for listening to The Velvet's Edge podcast with Kelly Henderson,
where we believe everyone has a little velvet in a
little edge. Subscribe for more conversations on life, style, beauty
and relationships. Search Velvet's Edge wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
M
Conversations on life, style, beauty, and relationships. It's The Velvet's
Edge Podcast with Kelly Henderson.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Brittany Tiper is a somatic experiencing practitioner. She has a
new book coming out, Body First Healing, a revolutionary guide
to nervous system recovery. Hi Brittany, Hi, Hi, thank you
so much for being here.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
We were talking a little bit before. I told you.
My listeners are very accustomed to the trauma conversation. But
I love what you're doing and what you're talking about
in this book because I do think it's really helpful
to break down what trauma is, how it happens, and
then what it can look like in your life, and
then how to kind of deal with that, because I
know one of your biggest points is that talk therapy
(00:47):
sometimes just isn't enough when you're dealing with intense trauma.
So I wanted to start by just maybe telling listeners,
like one of the questions I get asked by people
a lot is, well, how do I know if this
is a traumatic of event or if I'm just going
through a hard time, Like, how do we differentiate those
two things?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
So, working in the somatic world, you know soma means
of the body, so we focus a lot on healing
trauma through body and more specifically, though in sematic experiencing,
we really focus on the nervous system. So our definition
of trauma is that it's any event or experience that
(01:26):
overwhelms the nervous system's capacity to cope. And when that happens,
you can get, you know, seemingly stuck in a survival response,
so fight, flight, shut down, freeze, fawn, and functional freeze.
And I use analogies a lot just as a way
to really simplify this work. So I always tell people
imagine that it's like armor that your nervous system puts on.
(01:49):
It's like, Okay, we're going to armor up to protect
you from this event, this experience. But what can happen
is that it turns into like this night suit of
armor and it stays on even after after the event
or the experience is over. And that's usually due to
a lack of safety following the event or the experience,
or because your nervous system isn't quite developed enough yet
(02:10):
to be able to come back to safety, back to
baseline and regulation. And that's where a lot of developmental trauma,
you know, kind of occurs, and so then we get
kind of stuck carrying around and wearing this like night
suit of armor that starts. You know, at one point
it was self protective, but now it feels self sabotaging.
It's getting in the way of our life. It's heavy,
it's annoying, it doesn't feel like us. We start to
(02:32):
lose sight of who we are. And so I think
back to your question, what is trauma. It's gonna be
so relative to the nervous system that it happens too.
And I can give an example, and I share this
example in the book. So let's say that you got
Freddy and Johnny right. They're neighbors, they're eight years old,
they live on the same street, they go to the
(02:54):
same school. Freddy comes from a house where caregivers are present.
They're really attuned to his need. They also have regulated
nervous systems, so they welcome and discomfort. They allow for
emotional expression, and it just feels like a safe environment
for him to be himself, to express. Whereas Johnny, on
the other hand, he comes from an environment where one
(03:15):
of the caregivers is maybe not around because they are
working all the time, or you know, maybe there's there's separation,
whatever that is. And then the other caregiver, who is
physically present, is not mentally or emotionally present. Maybe they're
dealing with substance abuse or you know, something like that,
and so they're not regulated in their system, which doesn't
allow for his nervous system to really like regulate into
(03:38):
that safety. So it feels like a really tense environment.
He can't express himself authentically. And so anyways, these two kiddos,
they go to school one day, they get bullied in
the same way by the same bully on the bus,
same word said, same punch is thrown, and they're both
obviously armored up right, they're like kind of shocked, Oh
(03:58):
my gosh, what just happened. So Freddy goes home or Johnny,
I can't remember. Freddie goes home to an environment that
feels supportive. Both caregivers are there, They listen to them,
They help him regulate by they loan him their calm
and regulated nervous system so that he can start to
take that armor off. They listen to him, they allow
(04:19):
him to express whatever he's feeling. And then they say,
we're going to go to the principal tomorrow, we're going
to make sure this never happens again. He feels safe
enough to remove the armor, whereas the other child goes
home to an environment where one parent's gone again and
the other one is asleep on the couch, passed out.
And when he goes to wake up that parent, they're
clearly impered or intoxicated, and they yell at him and
(04:41):
they scold him, and they say, I don't have time
to deal with your stuff. Go to your room and
deal with it on your own. And so he remains
armored up. And so what you have here, and this
is where I don't love using the terminology of big
tea little ta trauma. Yeah, is you know Freddy or Johnny,
whichever one I mentioned, who goes home to the safe environment,
He might look back at this moment as like a
(05:02):
blip in the radar, whereas the other will look back
as this was a traumatic moment in my life. And
so really, what we often say is that trauma is
not found in the story or the event. It's found
in the nervous system and the nervous system's ability to
move through that or not move through that.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Okay, that makes so much sense to me. And I
love the example of the two different situations but going
through the same experience, because I've found often in life
that I'll look at two people and they'll go through
the same situation and they have completely different reactions or responses.
One person it completely derails, and the other person seems like, wait,
(05:45):
that wasn't that big of a deal, So why is
this impacting.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
You so much?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Over time? Does that build up or can that build
up within our nervous system to then make things that
happen later more impactful if maybe we'd didn't have all
that things built up.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
When your nervous system goes into a survival response, which
is those those states that I listed fight, flight, shut down,
and so on, there's something that happens within the body,
within your physiology. So adrenalin in cortisol is released into
the body to mobilize you. These are your mobilizing stress
hormones to mobilize you to fight or flee. And what
(06:22):
happens is if fighting or fleeing is not an option
or from an emotional perspective, we don't allow anger, which
is our fight emotional response, or we don't allow fear
and anxiety and worry, which is the flight emotional response.
If we push those down, then what happens is that
adrenaline in cortisol gets suppressed or essentially what we call
(06:45):
stuck within the system, and over time, those stress hormones
that the body is only built to metabolize through short
periods of time, when they get stuck, it turns into
chronic stress, which then turns into yeah, then chron mental, physical,
emotional health problems. But again another analogy. I love analogies.
(07:06):
You can think of like a pressure cooker, and what
you're talking about here is like you have this pressure
cooker of stress hormones and survival hormones that have been
built up over time. We call this allostatic load. And
if we haven't had the opportunity or the chance to
really process those experiences and to remove or express or
(07:26):
what we call discharge that adrenaline cortisol from the body,
then what happens is the smallest things, because our pressure
cooker is so full, are going to really activate us
and can feel more intense. And so that's like, you know,
the pressure cooker either explodes, which is like now we're
lashing out at people, we have rage, we're violent, we're
(07:46):
angry all the time and we're just irritated by life,
or we explode in the sense of flight, which is
like panic attacks, worry anxiety attacks. So we either explode
or we plode. And fload is more of that shutdown
or that freeze response, where now we're in depression, we're
in chronic fatigue, we're in burnout. And so I see
(08:09):
both of those in my practice, and that's usually the
accumulation of stress, chronic stress from usually unresolved trauma that's
built up over time.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It also would make sense to me why we saw
so much start happening maybe externally as far as people
fighting or losing it or mental health breakdowns after the pandemic,
because it was almost like we were all collectively going
through something traumatic and so then anything additional maybe sent
us into the exact place that you're talking about exactly.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
It was like that for a lot of people. It
was a straw that broke the camel's back. And you know,
in my book The Body First Healing, there's a big
old chunk that talks about the pandemic and how I
really think, Yeah, how I feel like that was kind
of an awakening for a lot of people because we've
gotten so so good in our very modern world, you know,
fast paced modern world of being really detached from anything
(09:04):
necked down yep, And we have all of these wonderful
behaviors in these you know, I'm gonna use air quotes
trauma responses of you know, overworking, overachieving, avoiding, running away,
you know, fawning people, pleasing, and so these are great
distractions from trauma. But really it is is it's just
(09:25):
stress being dressed up in a different way and used
in a different way. But it's these states, the same
stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol. They're just seeking and
trying to find someplace to you know, be be experienced.
And so people had to sit in isolation and I
feel like, come face to face and quarantine with their pain,
(09:46):
like there's nothing you can do to run from this now.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
So and you're not getting the validation because the things
you described are so praised in our society, and so
you wouldn't necessarily associate that with stress or trauma or
anything bad, even if that's what your body was feeling.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, exactly. And I share a lot about this nervous
system state called functional freeze. It's a blended state. I
feel like a lot of us are experiencing this right now.
But you know, the nervous system has a couple of
different primary states. So that is, you know, your rest
and digest, which is what we call ventral. And I
always like using the nervous system ladder for people to visualize.
(10:26):
I am a somatic experiencing practitioner, but I'm trained in
a lot of other modalities as well, and one of
them is called Polyvagel theory, and so that's the newest
kind of the upgraded science of the nervous system. But
porgis Stephen Porges who developed the theory. He created something
called the Polyvagel or the nervous system ladder, to illustrate
what the nervous system looks like. So it's a ladder
(10:48):
with three sections. So at the top, you're like in
rest and digest, which is what we call ventral, your
ventral bag state. It's your state of safety and connection.
But when you're activated in other words, triggered. Okay, when
our system is triggered or activated, we come down that
ladder and in the middle that section is fight or flight.
(11:09):
That's your sympathetic response. This is where the adrenaline cortisol
comes into the body. And if fighting or fleeing again
isn't an option, or we suppress the anger and fear,
which you're really good at, then we end up at
the bottom of the ladder, which is our dorsal vagel state,
otherwise known as shut down. It's kind of like freeze,
but freeze is more funded state. But it's important to
(11:30):
know that again, just like that pressure cooker, when you're
down in dorsal, which is not your state of mobilization,
this is your state of immobilization, you still have all
that adrenaline cord is al still trapped within the system.
So to come back up into regulation, you have to
move back up through fight or flight to discharge that.
And I also want to add people would assume that
(11:52):
regulation means being at the top of the ladder all
day long, but regulation is actually like a healthy bio
rhythm is being able to go up and down that
ladder roughly one hundred times a day, a hundred times yep, yep.
So even like stressful moments like yeah, and it can
be micro moments. So for instance, when you and I
(12:12):
were getting on and you were pulling up your notes
and then yeah, I was rushing to put on some
lip cloths and I'm like, oh my gosh, I have
to brush my hair. Yeah, I was experiencing stress and activation. Right,
So these are little moments that we don't notice. Some
of them are you know, think of like like waves.
Some of them are small, and then some of them
are bigger. So anyways, regulation is not staying at the top.
(12:34):
A regulated nervous system was what we call a flexible
nervous system, one that moves up and down the ladder
with fluidity. The reason I'm sharing this is because I
feel like it just gives a really good visualization for
you know, the nervous system. But also this functional free
state that we're talking about isn't one of those primary
states on the ladder. It is what we call a
blended state, so it's a mixed state of a little
(12:57):
bit of this and a little bit of that. So
function freeze is a little bit of flight. So we
have that flight response, right, adrenaline, cortisol, mobilizing. Usually there's
maybe fear anxiety, but there's also a freeze. There's a
bit of a shut down response. And so what we
can think of as the functional free state is going
(13:18):
through the motions without emotion.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Oh okay, Yeah, And as.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
You were saying, what it looks like on the outside
is like wow, like they're just strong, or like they just.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Handling all that.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Yeah, they handle it so well, or they're so right now,
what is it? Like? Hashtag unbothered they're so unbothered by things.
But it's really just a defense mechanism of shutting down
or dissociating from the somatic parts of us our emotions,
our sensations, our feelings, and so part of us still
kind of stays tethered down in the bottom parts of
(13:53):
that that ladder. And that also means that we might
show up in relationships with very little emotion or have
a hard I'm handling other people's emotions. But that also
means that we are dimming down the emotions that feel
good too, you know, so like we're kind of just
on autopilot and we're not really living. We really are
just surviving. So I think a lot of people are
(14:14):
there right now without maybe even even recognizing it.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, as you just said, the part about not experiencing
the good feelings too, I could immediately think of so
many situations where I was seeing that where you're going,
How have you gone through all this stuff and so
such a short amount of time and you're still alive
and functioning. But like you said, maybe they're not happy
or even presenting happy. It's almost like a going through
(14:40):
the motions kind of thing. Yeah, and it looks like, Wow,
that's kind of crazy, and that's impressive. But ultimately, if
you really kind of analyze what's happening, it's not happiness.
It's not joy, it's not ease or comfort. I'm curious
if we are suppressing all that cortisol but it's still
in our box bodies, what does that end that manifesting into,
(15:04):
Like it can't it has to do something right if
it's still sitting in your body.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yeah, there is a very very very strong correlation between
emotional suppression and disease and illness. There is a very
very very strong correlation between emotional suppression and disease and illness. Okay,
(15:34):
so the adrenaline cortisol is still it's still there and
it's still being used, and you can see this show
up in the body, in our musculo skeletal system, you
can see it in our viscera, in our joints, in
our fluid system. It affects our endocrine system, our hormones,
our cardiovascular system. Right, So you'll notice that when someone
(15:56):
has increased chronic stress, they usually have increase inflammation. How
that show ups in the viscera is I might have
digestive issues, ibs, gut issues. How that shows up in
the body and the musculoskeletal system is they might have
chronic pain and certain pain points so TMJ migrains, shoulder tension,
(16:18):
back pain. You might notice that from an emotional perspective,
this shows up as anxiety depression, you know, OCD, phobias,
and there's some of the research out there is you know,
autoimmune disease. So, for instance, when you're in this place
of chronic survival, all of those other kind of organ
(16:38):
systems that I just talked about and then some they're
all put on the back burner because survival is most important, right,
And so everything gets disrupted and everything is governed by
the state of the nervous system. If we're in a
state of rest and digest if we're in a state
of presence and safety and connection, then every kind of
(17:00):
operates fine, and the nervous system operates from the brain stem,
which governs which is you know, the neck and the
cerebellum here at the bottom of the brain. But this
is like the orchestrator of the body. So when the
nervous system, though, is in survival mode, everything about those
systems I talked about changes. So our heart rate is different.
(17:21):
Our blood motility, for instance, is different. So like when
we're in a state of rest and digest we have
a regular regulated circulation, but when we go into a
fight or flight response, our blood motility goes to our limbs.
And that's why we feel when we're anxious that we're
like really fidgety, or we're moving around all we're eating,
we're hot, or we're sweating. When we go into shut down,
(17:44):
it goes opposite. So the blood motility and circulation gets
we're kind of in a hibernation state, so that goes
to the core and that's why we have very little
circulation and we're cold, you know, when we're in these states.
So anyways, it increases our likelihood or you know, cardiovascular
autoimmune diseases, and a lot of that is because again
(18:05):
the body is working in priority for survival, not in
priority of rest and recover and you know homeostasis if
you will.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, well, I think we're getting a picture of some
of the work and in what the topics of this
book are about. And I want to dive into more
of that in a minute, but I want to give
the listeners a little bit of a backstory of you,
because I know you're not just a practitioner of these things,
you've actually lived them yourself. Can you talk through a
little bit about just what your life looked like that
(18:35):
led you to the understanding of like, talk therapy isn't
going to be enough for me on this one, and
I need to maybe take some different steps. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
So I didn't realize it until I got into more
somatic work, but looking back now, I know where everything
kind of started for me. So at birth, I was
actually I was taken from my mother forcibly, taken from
my mom and put into foster care because there was
methanphetamine found in our system. And I was reunited with
her after a few months when she seemingly got her
(19:06):
life back on track. But that really set the foundation
for my nervous system. Sure, and when we work with sematics,
you know a lot of what we're working with is
body memory. Again, it doesn't come back necessarily. Trauma isn't
found in the body, I'm sorry. In the story, It's
found in the nervous system, and that shows up in
body or what we call implicit memory. So the ways
(19:28):
that we contract, the ways that our muscles, you know,
kind of clench when someone gives us a certain look,
the way that we chase, the way that we run away,
the way that we shut down. This is all muscle
memory that was usually learned in our first three years
of life, and body memory starts forming at seven weeks
in the womb. And so I know that when my
(19:49):
mom was pregnant with me, she was going through very
traumatic time. She was homeless, living off of food stamps.
Her and my brother slept in her car, and obviously
my first few months in the world, I was separated
from her, and it was a really pivotal time, you know,
in infancy. And so anyways, that kind of started the
patterns of really intense anxiety around relationships, this fear of abandonment,
(20:13):
this feeling of I'm not enough of you know, feeling
of unworthiness. And I then lost my brother when we
were in high school. He was killed in a car accident.
My older brother, Dominic, and I kind of grew up
in an environment where you take all the hard stuff
and you just toss it under the rug, right like
out of sight, out of mind, And we were very
(20:36):
much so that family that just muscled through, and you
just my mom's not a very emotional person. I know why.
I learned a lot about her and writing this book,
and we had some really long, overdue but also very
healing conversations in the pursuit of creating this book. But
that was the template that was given to me, is
(20:57):
when times are tough, you just muscle through. And I
was very dissociated for a lot of my upbringing, didn't
really know what emotions were, didn't know how to feel them.
And then when I was twenty, I was sexually assaulted
by a stranger who helped me change my flat tire.
And I work a lot in the sexual violence prevention
(21:18):
space now, so I've worked with survivors for many years,
both home and abroad, And what most survivors will tell
you is that there is the trauma of the event,
and then there's also the aftermathea and for a lot
of survivors, the aftermath can sometimes be more traumatic or
more debilitating, and that was my experience. They caught this man,
(21:42):
they apprehended him, and after the assault, there was a
two year trial process, which was really unforgiving and horrible
to have to go through. But our trial was postponed
or continued nine times. Nine times. And that's often like
a strategy that defense teams will use when they know
(22:04):
that they're, you know, the perpetrator doesn't have a case
to stand on. They'll postpone as a way to like
emotionally wear down the victims so that they will drop
the charges. And because every time that happens, you essentially
have to do a dress rehearsal for trial. You know,
you don't find out usually until the day before that
they're postponing, so you have to meet with your legal team.
(22:27):
I had to go through the depositions again. I had
to listen to my tape statements. I had to practice
being on the witness stand, which meant that like nine
times I had to relive every graphic detail of that
night and I'm even feeling my feeling, my breath, and
that was really hard. And what was interesting is that
what people saw on the outside. I remember people saying,
(22:49):
you're just you're really handling this so well, you know.
And even after he was sentenced, the trial finally happened,
he was sentenced to sixty years behind bar. Yes, And
I remember the day after the trial watching on the news,
the news anchors talking at the newsdesk about my case,
and one anchor said to another, he said, twenty years
(23:11):
of covering court trials, I've never seen a rape victim
who was this poist, this composed who was able to
look her rapist in the eye and said you did this,
and you're going to pay. And what people didn't know
is that I was in such a bad place that
I was completely dissociated and completely shut off from myself
and when people weren't around, what was happening behind the
(23:33):
scenes is that I was struggling with severe alcohol abuse,
eating disorders, suicidal ideation, pill addiction, and not even thirty
days after that sentencing, I actually ended up in a
jail cell myself. And I'll give quick context to that.
So I was at with my boyfriend who was drinking
and driving, and I always say, that's a really clear
(23:55):
picture of where I was at at the time in
my life. This was also like fifteen years ago. So
he was pulled over and arrested, and when the police
officers went to pull me out of the car, I
had a flashback of the night of my assault of
a man touching me in a car, and my nervous
system went back into a fight response. I had actually
(24:18):
originally tried to fight him off, but I was overpowered
so that I went into a freeze response. And so
again this was all that accumulated and trial and cortisol
that was trying to, you know, stick on to any
experience to get this out. And so I ended up
in a jail cell with two counts of battery on
an officer with injury. And I remember going before the
(24:40):
judge after a couple of days because my parents did
not bail me out. You know, this this tough love moment,
and she knew who I was. She said, I know
who you are from that sexual from the sexual assault case.
And she said, we're going to drop the charges. But
she said, but you need to learn to live with
your pain better, with your trauma better. And that was
(25:02):
kind of the turning point for me because she didn't
say get over it, get past it, which is what
I'm accustomed to, and so that's kind of where things changed.
I should also state that while I was in that
jail cell, there was no alcohol, no pills, no crappy relationships,
no distraction, there was nothing kind of like quarantine. I
was in a literal prison, and for a lot of people,
(25:24):
they felt like, you know, the pandemic was like a prison.
But I was forced to sit in isolation with this
decade's old grief and trauma and the things that were
never spoken and never talked about and therefore never felt
as well. And my body experienced something in those two
days that I had never experienced before. There was trembling,
(25:45):
there was shaking, There was a lot of sweating, a
lot of tears, and it felt almost like a purge.
And looking back now, I know that it was my
body just finally discharging a lot of you know, because
in my life, I know I ever gave myself time
to sit down and do nothing or to be in silence.
It terrified me, and so I got really curious about
(26:09):
why I felt so differently in my body. When I
left that experience, I felt very different, and I remember
talking to my therapist about it. I was seeing a
talk therapist at the time, and I had for years,
and she recommended maybe you start doing a little bit
of work with a somatic therapist. And so that was
back in twenty eleven, twenty twelve, and so that just
(26:29):
took me down the rabbit hole of you know, kind
of this body body first approach.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah, well you touched on something. This was going to
be my next question anyway. But when I hear the
part about you fighting the police officer, it's so interesting
how you literally ended up in a jail sale because
of your skills that kept you alive possibly in the
first situation, or they were used for an attempt at
survival when you were going through the actual assault. And
(26:56):
isn't that so often what happens to us. It's like
it's needed at the beginning, Like these tools that we
pick up or figure out as a kid to keep
ourselves alive end up being the thing that later comes
back to put us in either a literal jail or
a figurative jail. And I love that you also say
(27:17):
figuring out what those skill sets are for you isn't
a place of shame, Like that's the place to find
the biggest kind of compassion for yourself. So can you
talk through that a little bit, because I know in
my journey I used to really go to the shame
place first of like why do you do that? Or
you know, this is whatever, and it's like, no, that
actually served me for a long time, that skill set.
(27:38):
It helped me through very toxic situations or relationships or
whatever it was, and it kept me alive. It's just
not serving me anymore. And so even when it comes
up now, because it's not like you start this work
and you just figure it out and it gets perfect,
you know, but like when it comes up now, I
can go, oh, I'm just doing that thing again, or
what's happening in my body to like make me feel
(27:58):
so unsafe right now? It's actually an indicator for me.
But can you speak to that a little bit.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
I often refer to them as management strategies or survival patterns,
like these old patterns that we enlisted back then in
order to survive. They started off as self protective and
now they might becoming self destructive. And these management strategies,
it's like they just need a little bit of updating,
some rewiring because they're outdated. But in the book, the
(28:32):
body keeps the score. Bessel vander Kolk. He says, you
know that trauma comes back as a reaction, and that's
kind of what you're talking about here, is these reactions
are these impulses of the body. It's a certain kind
of body memory called procedural patterns or procedural memory, and
it's essentially the procedures that our body uses in order
(28:53):
to move through a distressing moment. You know, whether that
is you can see it in posture, the way that
we close down that we open up again, the fidgetiness.
But the question that you asked is like, what is
it that's going on inside that that's then causing the behavior, Right,
So those are the impulses that we work with to
(29:13):
try and create new memory, new responses. And one way
that I you know, you can kind of again go
back to like the whole night suit armor thing. Yeah,
people often think that like, Okay, this armor isn't serving
me anymore, it's getting in the way of my life,
it's sabotaging me. I need to do away with it.
And it's actually not about doing away with it. In
the book, I use that analogy and I said, imagine
(29:35):
that it's like you're taking that night suit of armor
and you're like melting it down into a shield. Like
we're not discarding it, We're just we're not being consumed
by it anymore. And in moments when we need it,
it's still there because it still has purpose, it still
has intention, And I think that that is such a
(29:55):
much more compassionate way of looking at it. And also
the shame thing too, I mean, yeah, I can definitely
feel that. I feel that for myself because not only
was I hardwired into shame from a very early age,
you know, that internalized belief of I am bad or
I am wrong, other my mom wouldn't have done this,
(30:16):
or my dad wouldn't have left me, or you know
all those stories that we tell. Working with the shame,
and this is where a lot of like the younger
child or the internal family system somatic parts work. We
do a lot in my Body First healing program and
when that comes up. Actually, there's a do you know
(30:36):
who doctor Russell Kennedy is the anxiety MD.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
No, I don't, but that sounds interesting to me.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
So he's a colleague of mine, but he's an author, neuroscientist,
he's a medical doctor, okay, and he wrote a book
on anxiety. But one time we were doing a workshop
together and he said, a trigger is just an emotional
age regression.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
We're good, yes, when are.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Triggered, when we're activated, we are just taken back in
time to this emotional stamp, this emotional younger version of ourself.
And so rather than being like, you know, scolding that
younger version of ourself, yeahing it, it's like, how can
we actually meet that version of ourselves with so much
more clarity, compassion, understanding and when that happens, and while
(31:23):
also at the same time creating new choices, new areas,
new reactions. So yeah, I just randomly thought about that.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
But well, and if you do it that way, I
mean a lot of times I think that's called reparenting yourself, right,
But you're giving your nervous system the thing that you
didn't get that has now created this whole survival skills,
coping mechanisms, whatever you want to call it, programming within you.
So it does actually work. I often go to my teenager,
(31:51):
I mean, and she is like very sassy, but that
was the that's the one that I would go to first,
or then my my inner child, Like the younger version
was more weepy and kind of just like wanted to
be held, you know, those kind of things. But the
things that I've learned about how simple actually the rewiring
can be. Once you start learning about this stuff and
(32:13):
doing the kind of practices that you're talking about. I mean,
it's changed my whole life, like the entire thing. But
I want to ask for the listeners who might be
hearing this and thinking, Okay, I'm identifying with what they're
talking about. I've maybe had some experiences. I'm starting to
see it manifest in my life, like they start doing
this work. But then we're also still living in this world,
(32:35):
you know, and there's a lot going on right now.
How do we keep ourselves from continuing to just add
trauma to the plate and like survive this kind of
world that we live in right now.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
So I think that first of all, reminding ourselves that
our biology is incredibly adaptable, Okay, incredibly like the cell.
And I know this is this maybe not woo woo,
but it's real science, right Our happiatics, the history of
ourselves has survived and resiliently made it through some of
(33:11):
the worst conditions of this world, and that is a
part of our makeup and I think sometimes we forget that, like,
the genetic inheritance that we have is remarkable, right, yeah,
and somatic experiencing it is a it's considered a naturalistic
trauma recovery modality. A lot of that is the word naturalistic,
(33:35):
is that what we're doing is instead of showing people
that external factors and resources that can help them heal,
we're turning people. We're kind of posturing them to turn
inward and be like, you actually have everything within you. You
have the capacity to heal on your own, to self heal.
You were actually wired for it. And so I know
(33:57):
that sounds very wishy washy and can be hard to
take in when you're like, my life just freaking sucks
right now, right, It's really hard. So I just want
to give people that encouragement. Is I think sometimes we
forget where we came from as a species and how
much we have endured and survived.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
For sure.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Yeah, really cool to think about. So the answer is
probably simpler than you might think. Okay, when you have
a nervous system that's stuck in survival survival mode, which
by the way, makes so much sense based on the
conditions of our world, the divisive political climates, the air
that we breathe, the food that we eat where you know,
(34:35):
like we live everything. Yeah, we live in a very
disconnected society. We are always on our phones. I mean,
it makes a lot of sense. And we're also taught
let's not be with our emotions, which makes things ten
times worse. Let's pretend like we're okay. So what do
you do if those are things that you can't really change?
So think of your nervous system and other analogies. Think
(34:55):
of it like a security system that is always working
in the background consciously, and it operates through the subconscious
brain and the body, more specifically, the senses it is
sensing into am I safe or am I not safe?
Safe or not safe? And this is called neuroception. This
is your brain's ability to detect or your body's ability
(35:17):
to detect for safety or threat without using your mind's awareness. Okay,
And this scanning, the security system is scanning in three
places internally in your body, so inside, externally, in your
outer environment, outside, and then between you and other nervous systems.
We call it inside outside between Okay, So internally that
might feel like, oh, what doesn't feel safe? Is that
(35:39):
my stomach is really upset right now, or my heart
is pounding out of my chest, or oh, what does
feel safe is I have access to breath, and my
diaphragm feels really nice and open, and I feel settled
in my seat. Right we're not thinking these things, but
these scans are happening, millions of scans per second, same
with your outer environments, with your internal So what can
(36:02):
happen is that when you become chronically dysregulated or stuck
in survival mode, it's like your nervous system is constantly
alarming for danger even if it might not be there,
or it's not alarming for danger even if it is present.
So what we can do is we can start to
intentionally scan for things that feel safe, So things that
(36:25):
don't feel safe for what we lovingly call triggers. Right
in the sematic space, we call it activation. Okay, we
don't use the word triggers, but what feels safe is
what we call glimmers, So things that deactivate the nervous
system or deactivate that alarm. And so when you start
to do like se work, for instance, the foundational work
(36:48):
that we do with the client is helping them to
build what we call that felt sense of safety. So
it's rewiring and teaching the body and the nervous system
instead of just scanning for danger all the time. Can
we scan for what might feel good, what might feel okay?
What and what not necessarily what brings you joy and gratitude,
Like what just brings a sense of okayness or like
(37:10):
betterness to you? And so something as simple as like
orienting what we call exploratory orienting, orienting with the sensory
motor system. It's using site, sound, smell, touch, taste as
a way to just explore your environment. And when you
do that, you actually slow down the nervous system, which
(37:31):
kind of counteracts some of that adrenaline and cortisol. You
start to become more present and you realize, wow, there's
actually cues, neuroceptive cues of safety all around me. Like
even right now, there's a mirror in front of me,
and I'm seeing the way that the window in the reflection,
the way that the light is on right here, and
I'm thinking to myself, wow, it's really beautiful outside.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah, it's a beautiful day.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
Yeah. But what's important is that as you're doing this
and as you're exploring, you also want to notice when
we call this track, how does that feel in your body?
So like, how is your body experiencing this? What small
shifts are you noticing? So you might notice like, oh,
my shoulder diaphragm just dropped, or the root or my
tongue just dropped open a little bit, or I feel
(38:15):
like i'm my heart rate is regulating, or oh, that's interesting,
my hands feel a little bit more neutral and warm
they were really cold earlier. I feel more present, or
maybe there's an emotional experience, And so we call it
kind of stupid simple because when people start the work.
The Body First Healing Book is based on the Body
First Healing Program, and it's a program I've had for
(38:37):
many years. But it's six months, and in the first
three months of the program, we actually don't even get
into people's trauma, yeah, which some people love and some
people hate. Some people are like, I want to get
to it now, but we don't do core wounds until
month three because the first three months we spend time
building this foundation for your nervous system in your body
to learn the language of what it feels like to
(39:01):
be present, what it feels like to be with your body,
which can feel really foreign, but you'll be surprised that
by just doing daily tracking every day, like taking just
ninety seconds to be like, what feels pleasant right now
for me? What can I notice?
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (39:18):
How is my body showing me that that consistent somatic
experience we say, the experience creates creates new evidence for
the body and the nervous system that Okay, I can
have moments where I feel safe and present, and that
evidence then creates new expectation. So experience creates evidence, which
then creates new expectation where when I'm out in the
(39:41):
world now it's like I'm expecting that I'm not going
to be triggered all the time, and we start to
look for safety subconsciously more rather than always being so
armored up.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Or believing their safety even Like that's an interesting and
so that's so interesting. You brought up tracking because when
you were describing the moment you had in jail, the
very first time I did somatic kind of work, the
first time they had me do tracking, it freaked me
out so much because it involved me having to be
present in my own environment and I didn't realize how
(40:14):
disassociated I actually was. Yeah, and that kind of it
was such an interesting experience because I almost like blacked
out but then would like cry and then it became
something that was a very helpful tool. But it was
almost like I had to reteach my body and nervous
system this is okay to be here now first ye,
(40:35):
which was crazy.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
And that's that's kind of the biggest stumbling block for
most people at the beginning is realizing like, oh, I
have a body and I'm allowed to be in.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
It, right, Like this thing that's connected to me all
the time, I'm actually not even living in it's.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Where you know. And then that's where we go into
like when we override, Like and I can ask the
the question to someone in the program of like how
does your body show you? Yes, how does your body
show you know? And they'll be like I don't know,
and I'm like, okay, So when you set a boundary,
how do you know that that that that's a boundary
that you want to set And they're like, wow, I
(41:13):
guess I don't set boundaries. I have a hard time, yeah.
Or we allow our boundaries to be overridden because we're
not in touch with and that's what intuition is, right,
Our intuition is part of our gut instinct, and that
is literally our body showing us what we want to prioritize,
our authentic wants and desires. I know there's so much
(41:36):
conversation right now around authenticity and like how do I
know if this is really me and really not? And
a lot of that starts with learning this somatic language.
And one of the things we didn't mention at the beginning,
but I think could be important here is when you
talk about like conventional like talking about our trauma versus
like the feeling part, there's what we know and then
(41:56):
there's what we feel, and oftentimes those are two very
different things. And so with the trauma work, what we're
doing and working with the nervous system is we're helping
the nervous system to catch up with what the mind
already knows. Right cognitive therapy, where we know, yes, the
trauma is over, we can we can we have that
perspective that this is something that happened in the past,
(42:18):
but the nervous system in the body doesn't feel that
way and it doesn't have cognition to really understand that.
And what's also important though to note is that we
have this great thing, this great thing. We have this
wonderful thing inside of us called the vagus nerve. I'm
sure you're familiar with it. It's really popular now, you know,
vagus nerve stimulation in order to regulate your nervous system.
(42:40):
But the polyvagal theory came from all of the study
of the vagus nerve, and the vagus nerve it's the
longest longest cranial nerve in the body, but it's a
bi directional nerve, so it sends information from the body
up to the brain and from the brain down to
the body, and it's known as the information super Highway.
(43:01):
And what's important to note is that eighty percent of
the messages of the vagus nerve go from the body
up to the brain and only twenty percent go from
the brain down to.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
The body, which means fascinating, yeah, Which means that the
body has a lot more say when it comes to
how we show.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Up, how we feel, how we respond relationships. Yet we
again are so detached from the body, which is I
think why a lot of people right now feel so
inauthentic or they're searching for authenticity or is this really
me so just random thing too? But when it comes
to intuition and authenticity and like what's good for me
and what's not. If you're just doing that from a
(43:41):
mindset perspective, you're really missing a lot of the conversation.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Well, and to go back to your point earlier about
how a lot of our society is based on us overworking, overstimulating,
doing these things to avoid the emotions and being in
the body. So if you want to be authentic, it's
almost like you got to do reverse of what we've
all been taught exactly. Really fascinating. Well, I mentioned the book.
(44:07):
The book is called Body First Healing, A Revolutionary Guide
to the Nervous System Recovery. It is out now, so
I will put a link in the description of this
podcast for you guys. But Brittany, if people want to
keep up with you or work with you in other capacities,
where would they find you?
Speaker 3 (44:21):
So they can find me on social media platforms that
heal with Britt with two Teas, I would say, it's
not like Britney Spears help britt with two teas. And
if you want to learn more about the book or
working with me or joining the Body First Healing program,
you can just go to Bodyfirst healing dot Com.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Amazing. I will put that also in the description of
this podcast for you guys. Thank you so much for
being here. I loved this conversation.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
Thank you I did too.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Thanks for listening to The Velvet's Edge podcast with Kelly Henderson,
where we believe everyone has a little velvet in a
little edge. Subscribe for more conversations on life, style, beauty
and relationships. Search Velvet's Edge wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
M
Host
Kelly Henderson
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com