October 20, 2025 • 43 mins
Episode Highlights With Brittany
- What polyvagal theory is and the updated science of the nervous system
- Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and what this means
- Three principles of polyvagal theory: hierarchy of responses, coregulation, neuroception
- Humans have a bioligcal imperative to be in connection with others
- What glimmers or safety cues are and how to understand these
- Misconceptions and misinformed ideas related to nervous system regulation
- Regulation does not mean being calm, cool, and collected all the time
- What somatic experiencing is and how it can be helpful in processing emotions and physical symptoms
- Steps you can take and try now to support your body, emotions, and nervous system
- Trauma doesn’t always come back as a memory but can come back as patterns and reactions
- How to know if exhaustion is going into shut down or just the body finally being able to rest
- Why we actually have to go through fight or flight to climb the nervous system ladder
- When things can feel worse before they feel better
- Why the nervous system prefers predictable over safe at times and why slower is faster when it comes to the nervous system
- We will never be fully healed and releasing that expectation
- Body-First Healing: Get Unstuck and Recover from Trauma with Somatic Healing by Brittany Piper
- Body First Healing Program
- Body First Healing on Instagram
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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I'm Katie from Walnessmama dot com and I loved this
episode which is all about the science of safety, how
to rewire your nervous system for resilience enjoy and I
(03:53):
think this is such an important topic and one that
there's a lot of misconceptions around. And I'm here today
with brit Piper, who is an amazing voice in this
realm and you'll understand why when you listen to her.
She's a renowned speaker, author, and she's a somatic experiencing
practitioner specializing in sexual violence prevention and trauma informed care,
and as a survivor and leading advocate herself. She has
(04:16):
helped thousands worldwide, including the US Army and the Department
of Justice. Her upcoming book is called Body First Healing,
which is a groundbreaking approach to nervous system regulation and
recovery through harnessing the wisdom of the body. And in
this episode, we go into things like somatic experiencing and
what that even means, why humans have a biological imperative
(04:37):
to be in connection with others, and what happens when
that isn't honored. Misconceptions about nervous system regulation that can
be counterproductive. Steps you can take to support your body
and your nervous system daily that don't have to be stressful.
How to know if your exhaustion is for a shutdown
response or a normal response to healing. Why things can
sometimes feel worse before they feel better, Why we're never
(04:59):
fully healed, and why that's okay, and so much more so,
let's jump in. Ritt, Welcome and thank you so much
for being here.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Thank you. I am excited to be here.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I'm really excited for our topic today, and we're actually
going to get to have two conversations that I think
are going to be especially relevant and hopeful to the
audience which is largely a lot of parents and moms,
And in this first one, I would love to really
learn from you and go deep on the science of
safety and how we can rewire our nervous system for
resilience and joy. I've talked before quite a bit about
(05:30):
how one thing that was really impactful for me was
even just learning to decipher things that I was doing
that we're either sending stress signals or safety signals to
my nervous system, which were for me at least beyond
the things of just like emotional stress, but like if
I was under eating or undernourishing my body, my body
interpreted that as a stress signal. Even if like I
didn't feel stressed, or if I was like exposed to
(05:51):
things in my environment that my body wasn't handling well,
that was a stress signal. Or if I wasn't getting
enough sleep, that was something my body perceived as stress.
So I know, at least for me, like there's a
lot of it's very multifaceted, all the things that come
into our communication with our nervous system. And I also
have first hand seen how drastically, like when we understand
and address this piece, it can ripple out into literally
(06:11):
every area of our life. So all that to say,
I would love for you to give us some background
on what exactly comes into play here when we're talking
about the science of safety.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, so the science of safety is something that we
focus on a lot from a Polyvagel lens. So you
might be familiar with Polyvagel theory. Polyvagel theory is like
the newest or you could say, the updated science of
the nervous system. And the Polyvagel theory was developed by
doctor Stephen Porgis and was presented in the early nineties.
(06:42):
And so today what we're seeing is that there is
a lot of therapists, practitioners, helping professions that are using
the framework of the Polyvagel theory in order to support
you know, people through healing, through recovery, through regulation and
so as a somatic experiencing practitioner myself, I also trained
at the Polyvagel Institute, so a lot of the language
(07:04):
from the Polyvagel world comes into the work that I do.
And the Polyvagel theory is based on three principles. First
of all, what Porges found is that the nervous system
does have a hierarchy of responses when we get activated,
which we can see in the illustration of what we
call the Polyvagel ladder, the nervous system ladder. Maybe we'll
(07:25):
talk about that later. The second founding principle the polyvagel
theory is this concept of coregulation. So what he found
is that us human animals, and I say human animals
because we are primal animals, but we have also this
wonderful conscious brain as well, this human brain, but we
(07:46):
have the same nervous system, the same working nervous system
that animals in the wild do. And what por just
discovered is that we have a biological imperative to be
in connection, to be in community, because it means that
our chances for survival are higher when we're in tribe,
when we're with others. Not only is there this biological
(08:08):
component where we can help each other to coregulate, like
when babies are born. When I when my kiddos were born, right,
the doctor said, put your kids on your chest, and
that's going to help them to coregulate, to regulate their
body temperature, they're breathing, their heart rates. So coregulation is there,
not just this as this biological imprint, but it's also
(08:31):
there because when we're in numbers again, we have a
higher chance of survival. So that's founding principle number two.
And then the third principle, which is kind of what
you're speaking to, is this concept called neuroception. So neuroception
is the science of safety.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
And what's Stephen.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Discovered is that we have kind of like I often
refer to it as our security system. So our brain
and our nervous system and our body is always detected
for threat or safety without our conscious mind's awareness. So
think of it as your internal surveillance system that is
(09:08):
scanning for am I safe?
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Am I not safe? Am I safe? Am I not safe?
Speaker 3 (09:14):
What feels unsafe is a neuroceptive queue of threat or danger,
otherwise known as a trigger in our you know, just
our simple terms. And what feels safe is a neuroceptive
queue of safety, what we call in the polyvagal world
a glimmer. But this scanning happens in three places. It
happens inside, outside, between, So this surveilling happens internally within
(09:38):
our body. So do I feel safe in my body?
That might feel like, oh, my breathing is regulated, my
body temperature feels regulated, there's no pain I have. You know,
there's no digestive issues today. What might not feel safe
is my heart is pounding right now, or my circulation
is off, or my stomach is ance, my viscera isn't right,
(09:59):
and so then that sets off this alarm, which then
creates a whole cascade of things that happen. So inside,
am I safe?
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Outside? In my environment am I safe? So?
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Is there a car coming as I'm crossing the road,
or is there a storm on the horizon?
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Or is it sunny?
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Is it peaceful? Do I feel safe? Do I have
access to food and shelter and a roof over my head?
And then between so the between neuroceptive cues are you
and other nervous systems. So your nervous system is always
scanning other nervous systems, again subconsciously for signs of either
welcome which is safety, or signs of warning, which is threat.
(10:37):
And this happens through you know, facial expression, through body posture,
through the tone of someone's voice, through the gaze in
their eyes. So we are always scanning for again, am
I safe or not safe? And when we don't feel
safe or what in the se world we call activated
or in the normal world we call triggered. Then our
(10:58):
nervous system goes into those predictable responses of fight flight,
shut down, freeze, fawn, functional freeze. But what can happen
when we get disregulated, which means we're chronically stuck in
that state of activation or what we call a stress
response cycle, which is synonymous with our threat response cycle.
You can kind of think of it like we have
(11:19):
a security system or this internal surveillance system that's kind
of flawed. It's constantly alarming for danger even though the
threat might no longer be there, and then it creates
these attentional networks where it's only scanning for danger and
it misses oh, and it not misses over and it
you know, kind of scans over. It misses the cues
(11:40):
of safety that are actually available to us to experience
and to feel into to start to turn down the
alarm of the nervous system. So yeah, that's the very
long winded answer of the science of safety.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
I love that, and I love the triggers versus glimmers.
I loved that that terms emerged. I think even just
like the focus on noticing those noticing the bad, like
that alone seems like it over time helps us rewire
to like find the positive more. And you explain this
so well in relation to nervous system regulation, and I
would love to get into the practicality of some of
the things we can do to signal safety and also
(12:16):
how to kind of be aware of doing this maybe
in a non bypassing type way, if that is a
concern at all, only in that I feel like there's
maybe a misconception that's grown that regulated nervous system means
we're always calm and zen and I at least have
heard a couple of times from kind of experts that actually,
if you're in fight or flight and you're feeling disregulated,
to just like override that and naturally be calm immediately
(12:38):
is actually kind of like a bypassing, Like it's a
regulation not a regulation if you're forcing something that's actually
not in alignment with your nervous system. So I don't
know if that's an actual concern, but I would love
to talk about, like how do we in an aligned
way that's actually in a tune with our nervous system
start to send these safety signals, and how do we
know if it's working.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, So What's.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Interesting because I experienced somatic he in my own personal
recovery oh goodness, twelve twelve years ago. And at the
time when I experienced it, I had been in and
out of conventional talk therapy for most of my life,
and then somatic healing, I kind of fell into it,
and I was like, Oh, my gosh, this is so impactful.
Why is no one talking about this and how transformative
(13:21):
it can be and how much healing can actually take
place on a.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Nervous system level.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
And so I desperately started, you know, screaming it from
the rooftops, and I got professionally trained in it. And
I think a lot of people who are in the
space we've been waiting for this moment where these more
bottom up modalities are becoming more mainstream. And a lot
of the convers I've conversations I've been having lately is
that us humans are very extreme being.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
So we go from.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
One edge right one edge of the aisle to the other.
And now it's so exciting that everyone's talking about the
nervous system and how nervous system work, how impactful it
can be. However, there's a lot of, as you said,
misconceptions and a lot of don't want to say misinformation,
but misinformed guidance that people are giving. So from the
(14:05):
polyvagel perspective, regulation and from an se perspective, and I'll
explain sc a little bit too. Regulation does not mean
being calm, cool and collected all the time. And I'll
give you the analogy of that polyvagel or the nervous
system ladder. So at the top of the nervous system
ladder is our rest and digestate, what's known as our
ventral bagel state. As we get activated, the first predictable
(14:29):
response that the nervous system has, we come down that
ladder to the middle section, which is our sympathetic state
of fight or flight. Here we are mobilized. We go
into a mobilizing stress response where we have adrenalin in
cortisol to mobilize the body to fight or flea. If
we cannot fighter, flee or we override the emotional charge
(14:50):
of fighter flea, which is usually anger or fear, which
we're really good at as humans, right. We suppress anger,
we suppress our fear where we try to calm down.
I'm using air quotes here. If we suppress the emotional
charge and don't allow the body to metabolize it. Then
we come down into what is known as our dorsal
state at the bottom of the ladder, which is kind
(15:11):
of like a free state, but we call it our
shut down state. It's our state of immobilization. So most
people would assume that having a regulated nervous system means
being at the top of that nervous system ladder every day,
but that's actually not that's not true. A regulated nervous
system is what we call a resilient or a flexible
nervous system, one that moves up and down that ladder
(15:33):
all day without getting stuck. And from a physiological perspective,
a healthy bio rhythm or a resilient system moves up
and down that ladder roughly one hundred times a day,
which means we are in and out of moments of activation,
of stress, of frustration, of anxiety. And so there is
(15:53):
this misconception that healing our nervous system means that we
need to be calm, or that regulation means being calm
or never being triggered or never being activated. Regulation is
more so about being in our body, being with the
experience and not getting stuck in it. And if we
are overriding or not allowing the body to express or
(16:16):
feel what's coming up. Then that actually keeps us stuck
in what we call a functional freeze state. And we
have a number of what we call hybrid or mixed
states in the nervous system where it's one of one
state and a little bit of another, and functional freeze
is where a lot of us live in this modern
world where we're a little bit in a freeze shut
(16:36):
down response. We're going through the motions without emotion, right,
we're overwriting, but we're also in a bit of a
flight response, so we're functioning. We're going through the motions.
But over time, if the adrenaline cortisol is not being
you know, metabolized felt express, because we go straight to
our glimmer or our safety or what feels good to
(16:58):
calm down, and we stay stuck in that stress response cycle,
and the adrenaline cortisol stays trapped within the body and
the system, and over time that creates chronic stress, chronic inflammation,
chronic disease, chronic illness. Most of the clients that I
work with on the outside, they would say, well, I'm
good with my emotions, because you know, they don't take
(17:21):
over my life. However, I'm dealing with all these physical symptoms.
So there's a lot of digestive issues, maybe fatigue, migraines, TMJ, fibromyalgia,
autoimmune This is a lot of the physical or the
somaticized symptoms that we see in our practices because of
emotional suppression, because of this armoring up and muscling through
(17:44):
and trying to stay positive. So I have a lot
to say about that. But yeah, it is a really
big misconception. And I don't know where we got to
the place where we came to believe that having emotions
means that there's something wrong with us, right, or that
we're failing. It's normal to be emotional when something upsets us,
(18:04):
and when we're not upset, that's actually not normal. So
and what we find is that the quicker that we
allow the body to be with activation, to be with
a trigger, the body knows exactly how to metabolize that
and how to move through it and how to discharge
if we just allow it to.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. I think
that this actually is tremendously important and impactful for people,
and it definitely is an area that I did not
understand for a long time, and I'm still on a
journey of understanding. But for a lot of years, sort
of did all of the physical things. And I've talked
about this before, but like I had the checklist of
supplements and I was doing everything quote unquote like perfectly
and by the book, and I still had all these
(18:43):
physical symptoms, and I thought I had no emotions at all,
And it turns out it wasn't until I started to
let the emotions be felt that any ships, even in
my physical health started happening. And I know I've talked
before about like the body keeps the score and how
we're starting to understand more and more, and you've talked
about in this episode like this somatic connection, but I
feel like some people still maybe don't fully understand how
(19:04):
much these emotions very much can physically show up in
our body, even if we feel like we're not even
having emotions, probably especially if we feel like we're not
having emotions. And I feel like this is actually very
timely for me because currently the universe has created a
perfect scenario where I get to face every old pattern
that I'm aware of at least, so I would love
to get into the practicality of this a little bit,
because I would guess most people listening have at least
(19:25):
some small example of this they can think of somewhere
in their life. And often when there's these uncomfortable emotions,
we don't really want to feel them, we don't really
want to face them. So it can be easier, especially
if we have that pattern to suppress them. But as
you said, then they tend to show up in our
bodies if we don't listen. So how do we begin
to listen to them?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
So this is a great question and a big question.
I think this might be a good area where I
can introduce sematic experiencing. So sematic experiencing is another modality
that I'm trained in, and this is where a lot
of the practical you know, Polyvagel has given me such
a good educational framework of the work that I do.
Sematic experiencing is now the okay, Now, how do we
(20:03):
apply this in practice and in everyday life. So somatic
experiencing SOLMA means of the body, and sematic experiencing is
a naturalistic approach to trauma recovery through the body. It's
a body first approach and in somatic experiencing. This was
developed by doctor Peter Levine back in the seventies, and
(20:24):
Peter and Stephen Porgis are actually very close friends, so
the modalities are very blended together. But in somatic experiencing,
what we help our clients to do is to better
be with the experience of the body, both the good
and the bad, so both what feels good and what
doesn't feel good. But what we work with is we
(20:45):
work with body memory. So the book that you mentioned,
The Body Keeps the Score, it talks a lot about
you know, Bessel vander Kolk. He's the author of that book,
and Bessel says that trauma doesn't come back necessarily always
as a memory. It comes back as a reaction patterns,
And what he's talking about are the reactions of the
nervous system what we call procedural patterns, and procedural patterns
(21:08):
are known as procedural memory. So it's the way that
we subconsciously react to things without even consciously thinking about it. So,
for instance, when someone raises their voice, or they're shouting
at a sports game, or you're in a loud environment
and you start to notice that your heart is fluttering,
and that your stomach is in knots, and that you're
(21:28):
looking for the door and you're salivating and your sweating
and you feel fidgety. That is traumatic memory. So that's
body memory. That's a procedural pattern of how your body
is now in a stress response, likely because of a
traumatic or body memory from the past that didn't feel safe,
and you might not recognize consciously that your body is
(21:50):
going back to this emotional age regression where you felt
fear or terror when your parents screamed a night as
they were fighting while you were in your bed. And
so what we work with in the SE space is
we help our clients to notice patterns in their everyday
life today and we help them to create new patterns
because what can happen is when and kind of what
(22:13):
Peter's work focuses on is that trauma can be defined
as any experience that overwhelms the nervous system's.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Capacity to cope.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
And when that happens, the nervous system gets stuck in
the survival responses that it enacted or the survival state
that it enacted in order to survive. And so we
can get stuck in a flight response, which can feel
like fear anxiety, panic, worry, and over time that starts
to feel like a personality. But it's really just that
our nervous system is stuck in this experience. And so
(22:45):
in the SE world, what we do is we work
with the body to notice patterns and that might show up.
I'll give you an example of how that would show
up in one of our sessions is I would ask
my client, you know, what's something that's been a challenge
for you lately, what's a pattern that's been showing up,
What's something you want to work on? And they're like,
I'm finding I'm having a really hard time setting a
(23:05):
boundary at work with this one coworker, right, And so
I might say, okay, well, and even as you're talking
about that.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Now, what do you notice in your body?
Speaker 3 (23:14):
You know, as if you think about a recent time
where you had a hard time setting that boundary, And
they might be like, well, I'm noticing that there's tension
and constriction in my chest. I'm noticing that it's hard
to breathe. And then as a practitioner, I'm noticing things.
I'm observing that there's now a downward gaze, that the
shoulders are curling in and there's a hiding posture. I
(23:34):
might notice that they've crossed their arms and their legs,
and so they're going into a shut down response, which
is deactivating the healthy fight response that's needed to set
a boundary healthy aggression. And so this is likely a
pattern that was learned early on which now shows up
as people pleasing, fawning, playcating, not setting boundaries right, being
(23:58):
the peacekeeper, pacifying all of these things that we do
when we fun And so I might say, yeah, do
you notice that in your posture and they say yes,
And I would say is that okay for that to
be here? I'll give it a moment for the body
to kind of hide, and then I'll say, is there
any part of you that feels like it wants to lift.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Up a little bit? Or what would it feel like?
Speaker 3 (24:17):
You know, can we start to imagine that you did
start to set a boundary?
Speaker 1 (24:22):
What do you notice?
Speaker 3 (24:23):
And they're like, well, I'm noticing that my hands are sweating,
I'm noticing that my heart is racing.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So they're now.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Coming from this state of shutdown, which is like hibernation state,
to oh, I'm coming back up the ladder and to fight,
and even as I'm talking about that now I feel
persperated in my armfits. But they're like, I'm starting to
notice heat. And I would say, is that does that
feel tolerable for that to be here?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
And they're like, yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
So they feel the heat, they feel the racing heart,
which again is necessary. We're allowed to feel activation, and
then we allow it to be here for a moment
and we see what the body does next, and it
might be wow, now they're their eyes are coming up
and they're taking up a little bit more space in
their posture, and now it's wow, I just want to
open up my arms a little bit and kind of
(25:07):
move around. And now the body is naturally moving through
that adrenaline cortisol through the body. And so in somatic experiencing,
what we do is we allow the body to have
now the experience or the choice that it maybe couldn't
have back then. Maybe back then we weren't allowed to
set boundaries. Maybe back then we weren't allowed to run away.
(25:28):
And so again we work with the procedural patterns of
the body memory. Kind of think of it like muscle memory.
Your body subconsciously emotionally through sensations, through our viscera, our joints,
our posture. It is always telling us a story of
our history and of our trauma. And so we work
with the body to create new patterns, new experiences, touching
(25:51):
into oh I can be with the moment of anger
and healthy boundary setting. We show that to the nervous
system that I can do that, and then afterwards I
would say, okay, let's do some resourcing. Let's look around
the room, notice our cues of safety, right what feels
pleasant to notice right now? And oh, I'm noticing the
picture of my kid over in the corner, and I'm feeling, oh,
(26:13):
I noticed there's a hand on your heart as you're
saying that you'd be with that for a sec. And
even as we're with that, then we start to get
teary eyed. Oh, there's this feeling of I'm okay. And
so again that's some of the way that we work
with body memory to start to rewire the nervous system
to have new patterns. And of course, you know, I
can share how that shows up every day outside of
(26:34):
a session, but giving an example of how that comes
up in session, really I feel like gives some good context.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, that feels really helpful.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
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they need. You touched on it a little bit. I
would love it in a second for you to kind
of go deeper on the nervous system ladder. That seems
like a really helpful thing to understand. And as you
were explaining that, I could think of anecdotal examples in
my own life, especially when I was initially in that
phase of kind of addressing those emotions in the nervous
system side. Was I had times where I think, because
(30:38):
I had been in sympathetic dominance for so long, when
I started to enterpare sympathetic, my body wanted to rest
like all the time for months and months and months
and months. And as I started to like maybe get
a little bit more in touch with the fight or
flight that I had repressed for so long. I noticed
that I would have times where I'd be like, I
really need to go for a walk, or I need
to go like do some kind of like intense activity
to like move through my body. And I'm curious that
(31:00):
that's also kind of what you're talking about in ways
that can express and show up. But yeah, we'd love
to go deeper on that, and also the nervous system
ladder because that seems like a really valuable concept.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Absolutely, Yeah, So it's funny that you mentioned that, Kidie,
because the Body First Healing Program is a program. It's
a somatic healing program that I've had since twenty seventeen.
It's a group program, and it blends the modalities of
polyvagel theory sematic experiencing internal family systems, which is parts
work and attachment theory. And we have group calls every week,
(31:33):
and yesterday during our Q and A call, someone asked,
how do I know if my exhaustion is me going
into shut down and dorsal or if this is just
because my body has been in sympathetic.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
For so so long.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Then I'm finally having that I'm finally able to rest
for the first time. So for people who are in
sympathetic dominance for a long time, think of it like
your foot is on the gas pedal, you are fueled,
and you are guided by this adrenaline cortisol inducing lifestyle,
and you might be like, well, no, like, I know
I could rest, And the question is right, but when
(32:07):
you're resting, are you actually allowing the body to be
at ease, relaxing, yielding in your muscles, and allowing things
to really let go. So anyways, but what you find
is that when you have your pedal to the metal
all the time, there comes a time where as we
start to finally let the foot off the brakes, we realize, Oh,
as I'm letting the fill off the brakes, I'm actually
(32:29):
out of gas and I need to I think of
Dorsal in this response as being the refueling station. So
down in Dorsal, a lot of people there's this I
don't know where it came from, but there's this misconception
that if I'm chronically and shut down, or if I'm
chronically at the bottom of the nervous system ladder and dorsal,
(32:50):
that means that I'm really, really bad and this is
where we often experience burnout, chronic fatigue, dissociation, disconnection, and
withdraw retreating. But this is the state also of conservation.
This is the state of rest and repair. So sometimes
we need to be in dorsal in order for our
(33:10):
system to kind of recover, in order for us to
refuel refill so that we can go.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Back up the nervous system ladder.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Now, speaking to that, the nervous system ladder, it would
be nice to be able to spider man our way
from the very bottom of the ladder to the top,
but unfortunately we can't do that. So when we're stuck
in a state or we're in that state of shut
down and dorsal at the bottom in order to get
back up to the top of the ladder of rest
(33:40):
and digest or ventral vagel, that means that we have
to go through fight or flight in order to get there.
And so this can be really confusing for people because
when we're in this state of dorsal, we have much
higher levels of numbing hormones in the body, okay, and
that means that dissociation, like I said, is pretty common.
(34:03):
So we can dissociate from our body, from our emotions
from others from the world, we can kind of feel
like a shell of ourselves. And so as we start
to come up the nervous system ladder through fight or flight,
to finally allow the adrenaline cortisol that entered into the
system when we came down in the first place, to
finally allow that out. I always say, think of it
(34:24):
like a pressure cooker, this pressure cooker of chronic stress
hormones or adrenaline and cortisol that's built up over time.
Coming up the ladder means that we are opening the
lid and releasing that stress so that we're not overflowing anymore,
so that we're not exploding or imploding. And so for
a lot of people when they come up out of
shutdown and they start to feel why am I feeling
(34:46):
anxiety all of a sudden in my life? Why am
I feeling angry all the time or frustrated? Why do
I start to now feel the physical sensations of pain
or fatigue or digestive issues, Why do I have insomnia?
For a lot of people, it feels worse before it
gets better, And you can kind of think of it
(35:06):
as like you're coming up out of that dorsal that
shut down, kind of that freeze state, which means that
you're thawing out and you're now reassociating with all of
the sensations, the emotions, maybe the thoughts, the stories that
have been disconnected from your experience. And so for some
(35:27):
people they see it as regression, but in the SE space,
we definitely see that as progress. Your body is now
coming online and it's allowing you to start to move
through some of that discomfort. And what that means too
is that people now have as you're coming up the ladder,
that means that your nervous system has a greater capacity
now to be with both what feels not good and
(35:51):
what feels good. And so that's why the first kind
of step in the SE space when we are working
with a new client, for an instance, is we do
not jump straight into the deep end of trauma. And
for a lot of people that can be confusing because
in traditional therapy we go in and we immediately start
talking about our trauma. But what we find is that
(36:13):
that can reactivate the system and put you back into
the same symptoms. Instead, in the we're in the SE
world and somatic world, we work with this concept called titration,
which is a concept that Peter borrowed from chemistry, which
means one little drop at a time, one small step
at a time. So instead of throwing people into the
(36:34):
deep end of trauma, we walk into the shallow end.
We allow them to work with a little bit of activation.
It's much more gentle. Again, what was a moment recently
where you felt upset when I couldn't set the boundary
with my boss? Like, we're not going to hey, what
happened when you were seven years old and someone crossed
your boundary? Instead, we're working with the present, the here
(36:54):
and now and recognizing we're still working with the reactions
and the patterns of trauma without having to go to
this treasure trove of painful experiences, which for some people
is really nice because that means I don't have to
go back to the hurt in order to heal. And
for some people they don't remember their experiences, but the
(37:14):
body still remembers when we can still work with those reactions.
So anyways, we take it into this ti traded approach
where we work with very gentle, slow moments of activation
and then we step back out and then we just
step back in and step back out. And so people
are learning how to like tread water. Now they're learning
how to float on their back. Now we take off
(37:35):
the floaties. Now they're starting to go into the deeper end.
And it doesn't feel overwhelming. It feels gentle, it feels tolerable,
and over time, that's what builds nervous system resilience, is
actually touching into the discomfort in these small, tolerable ways
rather than just throwing people right into it. So as
you create a deeper capacity to be with activation, your
(38:00):
system will start to process a lot more of the
things that it felt like it couldn't process back then.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I love this and we're going to get it to
do a follow up episode specific to moms, because I
feel like this is also especially relevant to parents, especially moms,
because it seems like when moms do this work that
actually like ripples throughout the entire family, and we know that, like,
especially when they're young, kids are very connected in a
nervous system way to their moms. So I'm very excited
for that episode as well. But before we wrap up
(38:26):
this one, like I feel like this work is so
valuable and important and of course linked to the resources
you have and where people can work with you. But
from an expectation perspective, how long would you say it
typically takes for someone to start to see shifts within
their nervous system and to rewire the nervous system And
what are kind of the big factors in that process,
Because I know from first hand experience this can be overwhelming,
and also it seems like it can be it can
(38:48):
take a little while.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Yeah, yeah, it's certainly not a quick fix approach. And again,
keeping with that whole concept of titration, these small baby
steps that add up over time is really what you're
looking for your nervous system. Again, think of the pressure
cooker when it's stuck in dysregulation, either because of chronic
stress in your life or unresolved trauma. Your pressure cooker
(39:13):
is so full, you have enough stress on your plate already,
and so forcing healing can feel like another big change
to your nervous system, which can feel threatening. We always
say that same equals safe with the nervous system. It
craves familiarity. It does not like change because it wants
to be in positions and situations that are predictable, even
(39:35):
if they're not quote safe for you. So the healing
takes time, but that is for a good reason. We
always say that we want to stretch your nervous system,
but not further stress it. And for some of us,
we have this urgency which makes sense, this urgency to heal,
which makes sense when we're living with chronic conditions. Right,
(39:57):
there's this desperation of I just want the symptoms to enter,
I just want to get my life back, or there's
this hopeless feeling, and that's kind of the first step
is trusting that your nervous system and your body is
not working against you. It's working for you, even though
it might not feel like that, and that if we
(40:17):
give it the space and not war against it, right,
if we don't look at our body as something else
that is a threat again this neuroseceptive queue, and we
recognize that there's nothing wrong with us, We are not broken,
we do not need fixing, and that our body is
having a very natural reaction to overwhelming experiences in our life.
That would be the first step is trying and again
(40:40):
I know it's a lot easier said than done, trying
to change that perspective a little bit. Is that your
body is on board with you, not working against you.
But I will say so, for instance, in the Body
First Healing program, it's a six month program and we
actually don't even get into trauma work core wounds work
until month three, so that maybe sets the expectation for people.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
The first three.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Months we spend educating on the nervous system and your
nervous system, which are two very different things, and building
up your foundational tools of regulation, your somatic tools, which
are so different for each unique system. Understanding the concepts
of trauma and the nervous system, doing your own polyvagel ladders,
(41:25):
and so we do all of this foundational work so
that when we get into the core wounds work and
the trauma work in the second half of the program,
it never feels overwhelming. And so for some people, you know,
it's going to depend on how long your system's bend
stuck in chronic survival mode. It could take three months,
six months, to a year. For some people it takes longer.
(41:46):
But just having that expectation that you're looking for small, subtle,
tiny changes over time, that's what's more sustainable. Peter often
says that slower is actually faster when it comes to
the nervous system, but also ree too that I think
this is important to state we will never be fully healed.
(42:06):
I see this a lot in the se space or
people who are coming into the somatic world. There's this
concept of like, how do I just release my trauma?
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Right? I just want to do trauma release? How do
I get rid of it?
Speaker 3 (42:18):
We can release the hormones and the survival energy that's
been again built up over time, that chronic stress. We
can release that. However, we can never forget our traumatic memories.
The body will never forget, and it will consistently remind
us or trigger us when it feels like it's happening again.
So it's less of getting rid of it or getting
(42:39):
away from it and learning how to be with it.
So yes, healing can take time, but also it is
a bit of a lifelong thing.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
It seems like, yeah, very important perspective. And I will
link to your website and you're working where people can
work with you, and like I said, everybody, stay tuned.
We're going to get to do a follow up episode
specifically on somatic healing for moms. But for this, so Britt,
thank you so much. This was really really in depth
and helpful, and I'm sure everybody listening gained a lot
from it. Thank you so much, of course, Thank you
(43:08):
and thank you for listening, and I hope you will
join me again on the next episode of the Wellness
Mama podcast. If you're enjoying these interviews, would you please
take two minutes to leave a rating or review on
iTunes for me. Doing this helps more people to find
the podcast, which means even more moms and families can
benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time and
(43:28):
thanks as always for listening.
Welcome to My Body's Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
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I'm Katie from Walnessmama dot com and I loved this
episode which is all about the science of safety, how
to rewire your nervous system for resilience enjoy and I
(03:53):
think this is such an important topic and one that
there's a lot of misconceptions around. And I'm here today
with brit Piper, who is an amazing voice in this
realm and you'll understand why when you listen to her.
She's a renowned speaker, author, and she's a somatic experiencing
practitioner specializing in sexual violence prevention and trauma informed care,
and as a survivor and leading advocate herself. She has
(04:16):
helped thousands worldwide, including the US Army and the Department
of Justice. Her upcoming book is called Body First Healing,
which is a groundbreaking approach to nervous system regulation and
recovery through harnessing the wisdom of the body. And in
this episode, we go into things like somatic experiencing and
what that even means, why humans have a biological imperative
(04:37):
to be in connection with others, and what happens when
that isn't honored. Misconceptions about nervous system regulation that can
be counterproductive. Steps you can take to support your body
and your nervous system daily that don't have to be stressful.
How to know if your exhaustion is for a shutdown
response or a normal response to healing. Why things can
sometimes feel worse before they feel better, Why we're never
(04:59):
fully healed, and why that's okay, and so much more so,
let's jump in. Ritt, Welcome and thank you so much
for being here.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Thank you. I am excited to be here.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I'm really excited for our topic today, and we're actually
going to get to have two conversations that I think
are going to be especially relevant and hopeful to the
audience which is largely a lot of parents and moms,
And in this first one, I would love to really
learn from you and go deep on the science of
safety and how we can rewire our nervous system for
resilience and joy. I've talked before quite a bit about
(05:30):
how one thing that was really impactful for me was
even just learning to decipher things that I was doing
that we're either sending stress signals or safety signals to
my nervous system, which were for me at least beyond
the things of just like emotional stress, but like if
I was under eating or undernourishing my body, my body
interpreted that as a stress signal. Even if like I
didn't feel stressed, or if I was like exposed to
(05:51):
things in my environment that my body wasn't handling well,
that was a stress signal. Or if I wasn't getting
enough sleep, that was something my body perceived as stress.
So I know, at least for me, like there's a
lot of it's very multifaceted, all the things that come
into our communication with our nervous system. And I also
have first hand seen how drastically, like when we understand
and address this piece, it can ripple out into literally
(06:11):
every area of our life. So all that to say,
I would love for you to give us some background
on what exactly comes into play here when we're talking
about the science of safety.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, so the science of safety is something that we
focus on a lot from a Polyvagel lens. So you
might be familiar with Polyvagel theory. Polyvagel theory is like
the newest or you could say, the updated science of
the nervous system. And the Polyvagel theory was developed by
doctor Stephen Porgis and was presented in the early nineties.
(06:42):
And so today what we're seeing is that there is
a lot of therapists, practitioners, helping professions that are using
the framework of the Polyvagel theory in order to support
you know, people through healing, through recovery, through regulation and
so as a somatic experiencing practitioner myself, I also trained
at the Polyvagel Institute, so a lot of the language
(07:04):
from the Polyvagel world comes into the work that I do.
And the Polyvagel theory is based on three principles. First
of all, what Porges found is that the nervous system
does have a hierarchy of responses when we get activated,
which we can see in the illustration of what we
call the Polyvagel ladder, the nervous system ladder. Maybe we'll
(07:25):
talk about that later. The second founding principle the polyvagel
theory is this concept of coregulation. So what he found
is that us human animals, and I say human animals
because we are primal animals, but we have also this
wonderful conscious brain as well, this human brain, but we
(07:46):
have the same nervous system, the same working nervous system
that animals in the wild do. And what por just
discovered is that we have a biological imperative to be
in connection, to be in community, because it means that
our chances for survival are higher when we're in tribe,
when we're with others. Not only is there this biological
(08:08):
component where we can help each other to coregulate, like
when babies are born. When I when my kiddos were born, right,
the doctor said, put your kids on your chest, and
that's going to help them to coregulate, to regulate their
body temperature, they're breathing, their heart rates. So coregulation is there,
not just this as this biological imprint, but it's also
(08:31):
there because when we're in numbers again, we have a
higher chance of survival. So that's founding principle number two.
And then the third principle, which is kind of what
you're speaking to, is this concept called neuroception. So neuroception
is the science of safety.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
And what's Stephen.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Discovered is that we have kind of like I often
refer to it as our security system. So our brain
and our nervous system and our body is always detected
for threat or safety without our conscious mind's awareness. So
think of it as your internal surveillance system that is
(09:08):
scanning for am I safe?
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Am I not safe? Am I safe? Am I not safe?
Speaker 3 (09:14):
What feels unsafe is a neuroceptive queue of threat or danger,
otherwise known as a trigger in our you know, just
our simple terms. And what feels safe is a neuroceptive
queue of safety, what we call in the polyvagal world
a glimmer. But this scanning happens in three places. It
happens inside, outside, between, So this surveilling happens internally within
(09:38):
our body. So do I feel safe in my body?
That might feel like, oh, my breathing is regulated, my
body temperature feels regulated, there's no pain I have. You know,
there's no digestive issues today. What might not feel safe
is my heart is pounding right now, or my circulation
is off, or my stomach is ance, my viscera isn't right,
(09:59):
and so then that sets off this alarm, which then
creates a whole cascade of things that happen. So inside,
am I safe?
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Outside? In my environment am I safe? So?
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Is there a car coming as I'm crossing the road,
or is there a storm on the horizon?
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Or is it sunny?
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Is it peaceful? Do I feel safe? Do I have
access to food and shelter and a roof over my head?
And then between so the between neuroceptive cues are you
and other nervous systems. So your nervous system is always
scanning other nervous systems, again subconsciously for signs of either
welcome which is safety, or signs of warning, which is threat.
(10:37):
And this happens through you know, facial expression, through body posture,
through the tone of someone's voice, through the gaze in
their eyes. So we are always scanning for again, am
I safe or not safe? And when we don't feel
safe or what in the se world we call activated
or in the normal world we call triggered. Then our
(10:58):
nervous system goes into those predictable responses of fight flight,
shut down, freeze, fawn, functional freeze. But what can happen
when we get disregulated, which means we're chronically stuck in
that state of activation or what we call a stress
response cycle, which is synonymous with our threat response cycle.
You can kind of think of it like we have
(11:19):
a security system or this internal surveillance system that's kind
of flawed. It's constantly alarming for danger even though the
threat might no longer be there, and then it creates
these attentional networks where it's only scanning for danger and
it misses oh, and it not misses over and it
you know, kind of scans over. It misses the cues
(11:40):
of safety that are actually available to us to experience
and to feel into to start to turn down the
alarm of the nervous system. So yeah, that's the very
long winded answer of the science of safety.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
I love that, and I love the triggers versus glimmers.
I loved that that terms emerged. I think even just
like the focus on noticing those noticing the bad, like
that alone seems like it over time helps us rewire
to like find the positive more. And you explain this
so well in relation to nervous system regulation, and I
would love to get into the practicality of some of
the things we can do to signal safety and also
(12:16):
how to kind of be aware of doing this maybe
in a non bypassing type way, if that is a
concern at all, only in that I feel like there's
maybe a misconception that's grown that regulated nervous system means
we're always calm and zen and I at least have
heard a couple of times from kind of experts that actually,
if you're in fight or flight and you're feeling disregulated,
to just like override that and naturally be calm immediately
(12:38):
is actually kind of like a bypassing, Like it's a
regulation not a regulation if you're forcing something that's actually
not in alignment with your nervous system. So I don't
know if that's an actual concern, but I would love
to talk about, like how do we in an aligned
way that's actually in a tune with our nervous system
start to send these safety signals, and how do we
know if it's working.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, So What's.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Interesting because I experienced somatic he in my own personal
recovery oh goodness, twelve twelve years ago. And at the
time when I experienced it, I had been in and
out of conventional talk therapy for most of my life,
and then somatic healing, I kind of fell into it,
and I was like, Oh, my gosh, this is so impactful.
Why is no one talking about this and how transformative
(13:21):
it can be and how much healing can actually take
place on a.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Nervous system level.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
And so I desperately started, you know, screaming it from
the rooftops, and I got professionally trained in it. And
I think a lot of people who are in the
space we've been waiting for this moment where these more
bottom up modalities are becoming more mainstream. And a lot
of the convers I've conversations I've been having lately is
that us humans are very extreme being.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
So we go from.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
One edge right one edge of the aisle to the other.
And now it's so exciting that everyone's talking about the
nervous system and how nervous system work, how impactful it
can be. However, there's a lot of, as you said,
misconceptions and a lot of don't want to say misinformation,
but misinformed guidance that people are giving. So from the
(14:05):
polyvagel perspective, regulation and from an se perspective, and I'll
explain sc a little bit too. Regulation does not mean
being calm, cool and collected all the time. And I'll
give you the analogy of that polyvagel or the nervous
system ladder. So at the top of the nervous system
ladder is our rest and digestate, what's known as our
ventral bagel state. As we get activated, the first predictable
(14:29):
response that the nervous system has, we come down that
ladder to the middle section, which is our sympathetic state
of fight or flight. Here we are mobilized. We go
into a mobilizing stress response where we have adrenalin in
cortisol to mobilize the body to fight or flea. If
we cannot fighter, flee or we override the emotional charge
(14:50):
of fighter flea, which is usually anger or fear, which
we're really good at as humans, right. We suppress anger,
we suppress our fear where we try to calm down.
I'm using air quotes here. If we suppress the emotional
charge and don't allow the body to metabolize it. Then
we come down into what is known as our dorsal
state at the bottom of the ladder, which is kind
(15:11):
of like a free state, but we call it our
shut down state. It's our state of immobilization. So most
people would assume that having a regulated nervous system means
being at the top of that nervous system ladder every day,
but that's actually not that's not true. A regulated nervous
system is what we call a resilient or a flexible
nervous system, one that moves up and down that ladder
(15:33):
all day without getting stuck. And from a physiological perspective,
a healthy bio rhythm or a resilient system moves up
and down that ladder roughly one hundred times a day,
which means we are in and out of moments of activation,
of stress, of frustration, of anxiety. And so there is
(15:53):
this misconception that healing our nervous system means that we
need to be calm, or that regulation means being calm
or never being triggered or never being activated. Regulation is
more so about being in our body, being with the
experience and not getting stuck in it. And if we
are overriding or not allowing the body to express or
(16:16):
feel what's coming up. Then that actually keeps us stuck
in what we call a functional freeze state. And we
have a number of what we call hybrid or mixed
states in the nervous system where it's one of one
state and a little bit of another, and functional freeze
is where a lot of us live in this modern
world where we're a little bit in a freeze shut
(16:36):
down response. We're going through the motions without emotion, right,
we're overwriting, but we're also in a bit of a
flight response, so we're functioning. We're going through the motions.
But over time, if the adrenaline cortisol is not being
you know, metabolized felt express, because we go straight to
our glimmer or our safety or what feels good to
(16:58):
calm down, and we stay stuck in that stress response cycle,
and the adrenaline cortisol stays trapped within the body and
the system, and over time that creates chronic stress, chronic inflammation,
chronic disease, chronic illness. Most of the clients that I
work with on the outside, they would say, well, I'm
good with my emotions, because you know, they don't take
(17:21):
over my life. However, I'm dealing with all these physical symptoms.
So there's a lot of digestive issues, maybe fatigue, migraines, TMJ, fibromyalgia,
autoimmune This is a lot of the physical or the
somaticized symptoms that we see in our practices because of
emotional suppression, because of this armoring up and muscling through
(17:44):
and trying to stay positive. So I have a lot
to say about that. But yeah, it is a really
big misconception. And I don't know where we got to
the place where we came to believe that having emotions
means that there's something wrong with us, right, or that
we're failing. It's normal to be emotional when something upsets us,
(18:04):
and when we're not upset, that's actually not normal. So
and what we find is that the quicker that we
allow the body to be with activation, to be with
a trigger, the body knows exactly how to metabolize that
and how to move through it and how to discharge
if we just allow it to.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. I think
that this actually is tremendously important and impactful for people,
and it definitely is an area that I did not
understand for a long time, and I'm still on a
journey of understanding. But for a lot of years, sort
of did all of the physical things. And I've talked
about this before, but like I had the checklist of
supplements and I was doing everything quote unquote like perfectly
and by the book, and I still had all these
(18:43):
physical symptoms, and I thought I had no emotions at all,
And it turns out it wasn't until I started to
let the emotions be felt that any ships, even in
my physical health started happening. And I know I've talked
before about like the body keeps the score and how
we're starting to understand more and more, and you've talked
about in this episode like this somatic connection, but I
feel like some people still maybe don't fully understand how
(19:04):
much these emotions very much can physically show up in
our body, even if we feel like we're not even
having emotions, probably especially if we feel like we're not
having emotions. And I feel like this is actually very
timely for me because currently the universe has created a
perfect scenario where I get to face every old pattern
that I'm aware of at least, so I would love
to get into the practicality of this a little bit,
because I would guess most people listening have at least
(19:25):
some small example of this they can think of somewhere
in their life. And often when there's these uncomfortable emotions,
we don't really want to feel them, we don't really
want to face them. So it can be easier, especially
if we have that pattern to suppress them. But as
you said, then they tend to show up in our
bodies if we don't listen. So how do we begin
to listen to them?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
So this is a great question and a big question.
I think this might be a good area where I
can introduce sematic experiencing. So sematic experiencing is another modality
that I'm trained in, and this is where a lot
of the practical you know, Polyvagel has given me such
a good educational framework of the work that I do.
Sematic experiencing is now the okay, Now, how do we
(20:03):
apply this in practice and in everyday life. So somatic
experiencing SOLMA means of the body, and sematic experiencing is
a naturalistic approach to trauma recovery through the body. It's
a body first approach and in somatic experiencing. This was
developed by doctor Peter Levine back in the seventies, and
(20:24):
Peter and Stephen Porgis are actually very close friends, so
the modalities are very blended together. But in somatic experiencing,
what we help our clients to do is to better
be with the experience of the body, both the good
and the bad, so both what feels good and what
doesn't feel good. But what we work with is we
(20:45):
work with body memory. So the book that you mentioned,
The Body Keeps the Score, it talks a lot about
you know, Bessel vander Kolk. He's the author of that book,
and Bessel says that trauma doesn't come back necessarily always
as a memory. It comes back as a reaction patterns,
And what he's talking about are the reactions of the
nervous system what we call procedural patterns, and procedural patterns
(21:08):
are known as procedural memory. So it's the way that
we subconsciously react to things without even consciously thinking about it. So,
for instance, when someone raises their voice, or they're shouting
at a sports game, or you're in a loud environment
and you start to notice that your heart is fluttering,
and that your stomach is in knots, and that you're
(21:28):
looking for the door and you're salivating and your sweating
and you feel fidgety. That is traumatic memory. So that's
body memory. That's a procedural pattern of how your body
is now in a stress response, likely because of a
traumatic or body memory from the past that didn't feel safe,
and you might not recognize consciously that your body is
(21:50):
going back to this emotional age regression where you felt
fear or terror when your parents screamed a night as
they were fighting while you were in your bed. And
so what we work with in the SE space is
we help our clients to notice patterns in their everyday
life today and we help them to create new patterns
because what can happen is when and kind of what
(22:13):
Peter's work focuses on is that trauma can be defined
as any experience that overwhelms the nervous system's.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Capacity to cope.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
And when that happens, the nervous system gets stuck in
the survival responses that it enacted or the survival state
that it enacted in order to survive. And so we
can get stuck in a flight response, which can feel
like fear anxiety, panic, worry, and over time that starts
to feel like a personality. But it's really just that
our nervous system is stuck in this experience. And so
(22:45):
in the SE world, what we do is we work
with the body to notice patterns and that might show up.
I'll give you an example of how that would show
up in one of our sessions is I would ask
my client, you know, what's something that's been a challenge
for you lately, what's a pattern that's been showing up,
What's something you want to work on? And they're like,
I'm finding I'm having a really hard time setting a
(23:05):
boundary at work with this one coworker, right, And so
I might say, okay, well, and even as you're talking
about that.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Now, what do you notice in your body?
Speaker 3 (23:14):
You know, as if you think about a recent time
where you had a hard time setting that boundary, And
they might be like, well, I'm noticing that there's tension
and constriction in my chest. I'm noticing that it's hard
to breathe. And then as a practitioner, I'm noticing things.
I'm observing that there's now a downward gaze, that the
shoulders are curling in and there's a hiding posture. I
(23:34):
might notice that they've crossed their arms and their legs,
and so they're going into a shut down response, which
is deactivating the healthy fight response that's needed to set
a boundary healthy aggression. And so this is likely a
pattern that was learned early on which now shows up
as people pleasing, fawning, playcating, not setting boundaries right, being
(23:58):
the peacekeeper, pacifying all of these things that we do
when we fun And so I might say, yeah, do
you notice that in your posture and they say yes,
And I would say is that okay for that to
be here? I'll give it a moment for the body
to kind of hide, and then I'll say, is there
any part of you that feels like it wants to lift.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Up a little bit? Or what would it feel like?
Speaker 3 (24:17):
You know, can we start to imagine that you did
start to set a boundary?
Speaker 1 (24:22):
What do you notice?
Speaker 3 (24:23):
And they're like, well, I'm noticing that my hands are sweating,
I'm noticing that my heart is racing.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So they're now.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Coming from this state of shutdown, which is like hibernation state,
to oh, I'm coming back up the ladder and to fight,
and even as I'm talking about that now I feel
persperated in my armfits. But they're like, I'm starting to
notice heat. And I would say, is that does that
feel tolerable for that to be here?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
And they're like, yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
So they feel the heat, they feel the racing heart,
which again is necessary. We're allowed to feel activation, and
then we allow it to be here for a moment
and we see what the body does next, and it
might be wow, now they're their eyes are coming up
and they're taking up a little bit more space in
their posture, and now it's wow, I just want to
open up my arms a little bit and kind of
(25:07):
move around. And now the body is naturally moving through
that adrenaline cortisol through the body. And so in somatic experiencing,
what we do is we allow the body to have
now the experience or the choice that it maybe couldn't
have back then. Maybe back then we weren't allowed to
set boundaries. Maybe back then we weren't allowed to run away.
(25:28):
And so again we work with the procedural patterns of
the body memory. Kind of think of it like muscle memory.
Your body subconsciously emotionally through sensations, through our viscera, our joints,
our posture. It is always telling us a story of
our history and of our trauma. And so we work
with the body to create new patterns, new experiences, touching
(25:51):
into oh I can be with the moment of anger
and healthy boundary setting. We show that to the nervous
system that I can do that, and then afterwards I
would say, okay, let's do some resourcing. Let's look around
the room, notice our cues of safety, right what feels
pleasant to notice right now? And oh, I'm noticing the
picture of my kid over in the corner, and I'm feeling, oh,
(26:13):
I noticed there's a hand on your heart as you're
saying that you'd be with that for a sec. And
even as we're with that, then we start to get
teary eyed. Oh, there's this feeling of I'm okay. And
so again that's some of the way that we work
with body memory to start to rewire the nervous system
to have new patterns. And of course, you know, I
can share how that shows up every day outside of
(26:34):
a session, but giving an example of how that comes
up in session, really I feel like gives some good context.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, that feels really helpful.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
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they need. You touched on it a little bit. I
would love it in a second for you to kind
of go deeper on the nervous system ladder. That seems
like a really helpful thing to understand. And as you
were explaining that, I could think of anecdotal examples in
my own life, especially when I was initially in that
phase of kind of addressing those emotions in the nervous
system side. Was I had times where I think, because
(30:38):
I had been in sympathetic dominance for so long, when
I started to enterpare sympathetic, my body wanted to rest
like all the time for months and months and months
and months. And as I started to like maybe get
a little bit more in touch with the fight or
flight that I had repressed for so long. I noticed
that I would have times where I'd be like, I
really need to go for a walk, or I need
to go like do some kind of like intense activity
to like move through my body. And I'm curious that
(31:00):
that's also kind of what you're talking about in ways
that can express and show up. But yeah, we'd love
to go deeper on that, and also the nervous system
ladder because that seems like a really valuable concept.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Absolutely, Yeah, So it's funny that you mentioned that, Kidie,
because the Body First Healing Program is a program. It's
a somatic healing program that I've had since twenty seventeen.
It's a group program, and it blends the modalities of
polyvagel theory sematic experiencing internal family systems, which is parts
work and attachment theory. And we have group calls every week,
(31:33):
and yesterday during our Q and A call, someone asked,
how do I know if my exhaustion is me going
into shut down and dorsal or if this is just
because my body has been in sympathetic.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
For so so long.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Then I'm finally having that I'm finally able to rest
for the first time. So for people who are in
sympathetic dominance for a long time, think of it like
your foot is on the gas pedal, you are fueled,
and you are guided by this adrenaline cortisol inducing lifestyle,
and you might be like, well, no, like, I know
I could rest, And the question is right, but when
(32:07):
you're resting, are you actually allowing the body to be
at ease, relaxing, yielding in your muscles, and allowing things
to really let go. So anyways, but what you find
is that when you have your pedal to the metal
all the time, there comes a time where as we
start to finally let the foot off the brakes, we realize, Oh,
as I'm letting the fill off the brakes, I'm actually
(32:29):
out of gas and I need to I think of
Dorsal in this response as being the refueling station. So
down in Dorsal, a lot of people there's this I
don't know where it came from, but there's this misconception
that if I'm chronically and shut down, or if I'm
chronically at the bottom of the nervous system ladder and dorsal,
(32:50):
that means that I'm really, really bad and this is
where we often experience burnout, chronic fatigue, dissociation, disconnection, and
withdraw retreating. But this is the state also of conservation.
This is the state of rest and repair. So sometimes
we need to be in dorsal in order for our
(33:10):
system to kind of recover, in order for us to
refuel refill so that we can go.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Back up the nervous system ladder.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Now, speaking to that, the nervous system ladder, it would
be nice to be able to spider man our way
from the very bottom of the ladder to the top,
but unfortunately we can't do that. So when we're stuck
in a state or we're in that state of shut
down and dorsal at the bottom in order to get
back up to the top of the ladder of rest
(33:40):
and digest or ventral vagel, that means that we have
to go through fight or flight in order to get there.
And so this can be really confusing for people because
when we're in this state of dorsal, we have much
higher levels of numbing hormones in the body, okay, and
that means that dissociation, like I said, is pretty common.
(34:03):
So we can dissociate from our body, from our emotions
from others from the world, we can kind of feel
like a shell of ourselves. And so as we start
to come up the nervous system ladder through fight or flight,
to finally allow the adrenaline cortisol that entered into the
system when we came down in the first place, to
finally allow that out. I always say, think of it
(34:24):
like a pressure cooker, this pressure cooker of chronic stress
hormones or adrenaline and cortisol that's built up over time.
Coming up the ladder means that we are opening the
lid and releasing that stress so that we're not overflowing anymore,
so that we're not exploding or imploding. And so for
a lot of people when they come up out of
shutdown and they start to feel why am I feeling
(34:46):
anxiety all of a sudden in my life? Why am
I feeling angry all the time or frustrated? Why do
I start to now feel the physical sensations of pain
or fatigue or digestive issues, Why do I have insomnia?
For a lot of people, it feels worse before it
gets better, And you can kind of think of it
(35:06):
as like you're coming up out of that dorsal that
shut down, kind of that freeze state, which means that
you're thawing out and you're now reassociating with all of
the sensations, the emotions, maybe the thoughts, the stories that
have been disconnected from your experience. And so for some
(35:27):
people they see it as regression, but in the SE space,
we definitely see that as progress. Your body is now
coming online and it's allowing you to start to move
through some of that discomfort. And what that means too
is that people now have as you're coming up the ladder,
that means that your nervous system has a greater capacity
now to be with both what feels not good and
(35:51):
what feels good. And so that's why the first kind
of step in the SE space when we are working
with a new client, for an instance, is we do
not jump straight into the deep end of trauma. And
for a lot of people that can be confusing because
in traditional therapy we go in and we immediately start
talking about our trauma. But what we find is that
(36:13):
that can reactivate the system and put you back into
the same symptoms. Instead, in the we're in the SE
world and somatic world, we work with this concept called titration,
which is a concept that Peter borrowed from chemistry, which
means one little drop at a time, one small step
at a time. So instead of throwing people into the
(36:34):
deep end of trauma, we walk into the shallow end.
We allow them to work with a little bit of activation.
It's much more gentle. Again, what was a moment recently
where you felt upset when I couldn't set the boundary
with my boss? Like, we're not going to hey, what
happened when you were seven years old and someone crossed
your boundary? Instead, we're working with the present, the here
(36:54):
and now and recognizing we're still working with the reactions
and the patterns of trauma without having to go to
this treasure trove of painful experiences, which for some people
is really nice because that means I don't have to
go back to the hurt in order to heal. And
for some people they don't remember their experiences, but the
(37:14):
body still remembers when we can still work with those reactions.
So anyways, we take it into this ti traded approach
where we work with very gentle, slow moments of activation
and then we step back out and then we just
step back in and step back out. And so people
are learning how to like tread water. Now they're learning
how to float on their back. Now we take off
(37:35):
the floaties. Now they're starting to go into the deeper end.
And it doesn't feel overwhelming. It feels gentle, it feels tolerable,
and over time, that's what builds nervous system resilience, is
actually touching into the discomfort in these small, tolerable ways
rather than just throwing people right into it. So as
you create a deeper capacity to be with activation, your
(38:00):
system will start to process a lot more of the
things that it felt like it couldn't process back then.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I love this and we're going to get it to
do a follow up episode specific to moms, because I
feel like this is also especially relevant to parents, especially moms,
because it seems like when moms do this work that
actually like ripples throughout the entire family, and we know that, like,
especially when they're young, kids are very connected in a
nervous system way to their moms. So I'm very excited
for that episode as well. But before we wrap up
(38:26):
this one, like I feel like this work is so
valuable and important and of course linked to the resources
you have and where people can work with you. But
from an expectation perspective, how long would you say it
typically takes for someone to start to see shifts within
their nervous system and to rewire the nervous system And
what are kind of the big factors in that process,
Because I know from first hand experience this can be overwhelming,
and also it seems like it can be it can
(38:48):
take a little while.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Yeah, yeah, it's certainly not a quick fix approach. And again,
keeping with that whole concept of titration, these small baby
steps that add up over time is really what you're
looking for your nervous system. Again, think of the pressure
cooker when it's stuck in dysregulation, either because of chronic
stress in your life or unresolved trauma. Your pressure cooker
(39:13):
is so full, you have enough stress on your plate already,
and so forcing healing can feel like another big change
to your nervous system, which can feel threatening. We always
say that same equals safe with the nervous system. It
craves familiarity. It does not like change because it wants
to be in positions and situations that are predictable, even
(39:35):
if they're not quote safe for you. So the healing
takes time, but that is for a good reason. We
always say that we want to stretch your nervous system,
but not further stress it. And for some of us,
we have this urgency which makes sense, this urgency to heal,
which makes sense when we're living with chronic conditions. Right,
(39:57):
there's this desperation of I just want the symptoms to enter,
I just want to get my life back, or there's
this hopeless feeling, and that's kind of the first step
is trusting that your nervous system and your body is
not working against you. It's working for you, even though
it might not feel like that, and that if we
(40:17):
give it the space and not war against it, right,
if we don't look at our body as something else
that is a threat again this neuroseceptive queue, and we
recognize that there's nothing wrong with us, We are not broken,
we do not need fixing, and that our body is
having a very natural reaction to overwhelming experiences in our life.
That would be the first step is trying and again
(40:40):
I know it's a lot easier said than done, trying
to change that perspective a little bit. Is that your
body is on board with you, not working against you.
But I will say so, for instance, in the Body
First Healing program, it's a six month program and we
actually don't even get into trauma work core wounds work
until month three, so that maybe sets the expectation for people.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
The first three.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Months we spend educating on the nervous system and your
nervous system, which are two very different things, and building
up your foundational tools of regulation, your somatic tools, which
are so different for each unique system. Understanding the concepts
of trauma and the nervous system, doing your own polyvagel ladders,
(41:25):
and so we do all of this foundational work so
that when we get into the core wounds work and
the trauma work in the second half of the program,
it never feels overwhelming. And so for some people, you know,
it's going to depend on how long your system's bend
stuck in chronic survival mode. It could take three months,
six months, to a year. For some people it takes longer.
(41:46):
But just having that expectation that you're looking for small, subtle,
tiny changes over time, that's what's more sustainable. Peter often
says that slower is actually faster when it comes to
the nervous system, but also ree too that I think
this is important to state we will never be fully healed.
(42:06):
I see this a lot in the se space or
people who are coming into the somatic world. There's this
concept of like, how do I just release my trauma?
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Right? I just want to do trauma release? How do
I get rid of it?
Speaker 3 (42:18):
We can release the hormones and the survival energy that's
been again built up over time, that chronic stress. We
can release that. However, we can never forget our traumatic memories.
The body will never forget, and it will consistently remind
us or trigger us when it feels like it's happening again.
So it's less of getting rid of it or getting
(42:39):
away from it and learning how to be with it.
So yes, healing can take time, but also it is
a bit of a lifelong thing.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
It seems like, yeah, very important perspective. And I will
link to your website and you're working where people can
work with you, and like I said, everybody, stay tuned.
We're going to get to do a follow up episode
specifically on somatic healing for moms. But for this, so Britt,
thank you so much. This was really really in depth
and helpful, and I'm sure everybody listening gained a lot
from it. Thank you so much, of course, Thank you
(43:08):
and thank you for listening, and I hope you will
join me again on the next episode of the Wellness
Mama podcast. If you're enjoying these interviews, would you please
take two minutes to leave a rating or review on
iTunes for me. Doing this helps more people to find
the podcast, which means even more moms and families can
benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time and
(43:28):
thanks as always for listening.
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