Somatic Therapy: the missing piece in the healing puzzle [an interview with Britt Piper]

I've been really drawn to ADHD as a trauma response lately. That’s why I’m excited I got to pick Britt Piper’s brain about this idea of complex trauma as something that often coincides with neurodivergence.

So, how do we meet the needs of these wounded parts of ourselves, when as a culture, we've been taught: talk therapy is the answer?

As someone who's been in talk therapy for most of my life, I've found that there's parts of it that are so valuable in understanding myself. But then I have this tendency to get stuck overanalyzing my trauma. I know why all of this is happening, but there's this disconnect between my mind and my body.

That's how I landed on your work. The somatic space feels like this bridge that we're not all receiving access to. Do you feel that?

Britt: Yes, and I first want to start off by saying that somatic healing has been around a lot longer than we realize. For instance, what I specialize in, which is somatic experiencing, was actually created back in the 1970s.

Soma means body oriented. And for a long time, people thought that these modalities were kind of woo woo- not based on science. But, they very much are.

There's been body based healing and mind based healing. And I think what we're actually talking about is one in the same, because the body informs the mind, the mind informs the body, and it's just two different pieces of the exact same puzzle.

I think that we're finally at a moment in the healing space where people realize the mainstream is missing half the conversation, which has been so focused on mindset, cognition, and talk therapy.

It's not just scholars and researchers, but clients and the general public are recognizing that they're missing a part of this puzzle.

• They’ve felt stuck in cycles and the same patterns.

• They've been talking ad nauseam about their trauma and past.

• They feel like it's kind of hindering them and they just don't know how to get out of it.

That's where the somatic space has really come in and been such a wonderful compliment to the work that's already being done in the therapeutic space.

So often there's this warring conversation of you're either body based or you're focusing on the mind. And what I really aim to do is to help people recognize that they need to work both.

The disconnect between the mind and body

Melissa: I think where I’ve felt stuck is: I've got all this head knowledge, but I'm not feeling relief in my body. There’s a disconnect where I wondered, how do I get there?

Then I learned about the nervous system and I was like, Oh, that's how I get there. I get into my body through my nervous system.

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Britt: Yes, and what you just said is really interesting, there's what we know and there's what we feel. And those can be two very different things.

The nervous system predominantly operates from the feeling part of us, from the subconscious part of the brain, which is, without getting too much into the science, the mammalian brain, the limbic system, which is the midbrain, that's our emotion feeling sensation brain.

- The feeling part of our brain

And then the bottom part of the brain, which is the other tier of the subconscious, is that reptilian brain. That's the brainstem, the survival brain, and that's impulse and instinct.

- The survival part of our brain

Cognition is in the neocortex at the top. This is the human brain or the thinking cognitive brain, and that's where talk therapy really focuses- cognition, learning, talking, thinking.

- The thinking part of our brain

But the nervous system doesn't really operate from there. The nervous system operates from the subconscious.

And so, when you were talking about trauma responses, there is a wonderful quote by, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, and he states that:

Trauma doesn't come back as a memory, but it comes back as a response.

What he’s talking about is that response, that stuck physiology, the stuck survival response of the nervous system.

Trauma can be defined as any experience or event that overwhelms the nervous system.

Anything that feels like:

• too much

• too fast

• too soon

• or not enough.

  • Like in childhood there wasn't enough stability, there wasn't enough affection, there wasn't enough validation of my feelings.

And when we experience that, the system gets stuck in survival mode.

The nervous system informs most everything that happens within our body. It informs our mind, thought patterns and the way we operate. So, that's really the key and the entry into a lot of this work: through the nervous system.

Is trauma how we relate to our experiences?

Melissa: I've heard Gabor Mate say something about trauma being how we relate to our experiences. That, internally, the way we interpret what we experienced creates the trauma as well. Do you feel like that's a piece of it?

Britt: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people talk about nervous system regulation as this process of getting all the stuck adrenaline and cortisol out of us and regulating our system with vagus nerve exercises.

They get very technical, but at the end of the day, what really matters is the relationship that we have to our responses.

So we experience a flight response and we feel full of fear and anxiety and panic. We worry and overcatastrophize, right?

If we see that as something to manage, to fix, to make go away, it's just gonna create more dysregulation.

We start judging ourselves:

• I shouldn't be feeling this.

• Something’s wrong with me.

And I think that's what he's touching on is:

• it's more about how we relate to these responses, which are really just younger parts of us that are coming up in the present day and trying to employ these old survival tactical skills that they learned back then, here in the present.

What we resist will just persist within the body, within our impulses, our behaviors, our thought patterns. So that relationship part is such a big part of the conversation for sure.

Reparenting your inner child

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Melissa: I know you work with internal family systems, along with the somatic, the nervous system and the attachment cells.

For someone who's stuck in a functional freeze or survival mode, who’s going back to the head, like, okay, here's all the things:

How do we get into the body, taking all the goodness from these different ways of healing, and actually implement it?

Britt: So I think there are two questions there:

1. How do we get into the body?

2. How do I start to implement some of this work?

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How do we get into the body?

Getting into the body is a learned skill. And a lot of us didn't grow up, generationally, in homes where it was okay to be in your body, to be with your emotions, to be expressing, to be releasing what is there.

A lot of our cultural norms, hold us to the standard that we have to be put together.

We have to be poised.

We can't cry.

We can't be trembling, shaking all of these things.

However, the nervous system and the brain operate from the mammalian parts of us. We have the same nervous system that animals in the wild have. We are human animals. There is a primal nature to us, right?

• When we feel anger, we get full of rage.

• When we feel terrified, we shake, we tremble.

But in our conditioned society, where we have this wonderful thing that animals don't have, which is the human brain, we will often judge those very natural experiences.

You have a presentation and feel anxious = I'm shaking and I just need to breathe and calm down.

• No. Can you be with the trembling and shaking?

• What's coming up in the body?

Learning how to feel is not only something that we weren't taught, but it was something that we could be punished for, right?

We have these terms like tantrums (and I could get into that more now that I'm a mom myself.) There's so much about our parenting styles, especially in previous generations where this healthy life force, this healthy energy that we have as human animals, it was diminished and it was extinguished from a very young age, right?

• And we carry that on into adulthood.

So, how do I even start with somatic healing if I don't know how to feel anything in my body?

You can start by noticing and observing.

We call this interoception.

• Observing the signals that your body sends you every day.

  • So, I have to go to the bathroom. How's my body showing me that? Because I'm clenching a little bit. I feel that urge.

  • And it sounds so simple, but we are so dissociated from the neck down, because we live in such a fast paced world that we don't ever slow down enough to listen to what our body needs.

“No, I have a long list of stuff to do today.” Well, your body, by your posture, is showing me that you're collapsed and you're exhausted and I think you're burnt out and you actually need rest today.

That's where the warring of the mind and body comes into our everyday life.

So start to just track the language of your body.

• How does your body show you, a yes?

  • What's the emotion?

  • What's the feeling?

  • What's the sensation?

• How is your body showing you it's a no.

  • I'm noticing there's actually a lot of sweat in my hands.

  • I'm noticing my posture is closing in.

  • I'm making myself small.

  • There's constriction in my chest and there's a lump in my throat.

• How's my body showing me I'm tired. etc.

Listening to your body without the mental chatter

Melissa: What's coming up for me as you're talking, is: I can observe the no, but then there’s the conditioning of it “should” be a yes. The mental chatter of the guilt and shame for not doing it in the expected way or disappointing someone or you know, I feel like that part's a challenge.

Honoring the sensations in the body and building that trust with our body to follow through on it.

Britt: For sure. These internal family systems, these younger parts of you, they're like, no, I need to say yes. Even though my body's telling me, no, I need to say yes right now. I don't want to disappoint them. I don't want to let them down.

And that's a younger Melissa right now. So how can we relate to her?

How can we attune to her and be like:

• Yeah, I get that you want to give in.

• I get that you want to say yes.

• And that makes sense because that's a pattern that you learned at a young age.

We also call this inner relationship focusing, which is another modality that was created by Dr. Maureen Gallagher, it’s the feeling that we have about the feeling.

So, as I'm noticing this desire to, say no, this constriction along with this feeling that I'm not allowed to say no. As with any relationship, it takes time and tending to trust.

But it's the small, subtle moments where we make a different choice that gives the nervous system an experience and evidence that things can be different.

It doesn't mean that that inner dialogue is going to go away. That will be there, but how can I also make space for a different choice as well?

Melissa: Yes and that builds trust. What I hear you speaking to is reparenting these younger versions of ourselves. And when those smaller versions of us feel safe with current us to actually listen to them and validate their experiences in their body.

I'm wondering if that impacts the sensation of safety within ourselves?

Britt: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's a lot of what internal family systems is: “parts work,” tending to our younger parts, our younger selves, from the perspective of our now adult regulated self.

Peter Levine, the creator of somatic experiencing, he always says it's never too late to give yourself the childhood that you deserve.

And that's absolutely true. That's self-attunement.

• In those moments where I'm throwing my tantrum or this protector part is coming out and wants to avoid or run away or shut down or play small.

  • How can I attune to them? How can I give them the love, the nurturing, the encouragement, the compassion that I didn't receive back then?

And the great thing about these younger parts is they have no concept of time. They live in the parts of our mind that don't have a concept of time and they live within the implicit memory of the body, not so much the explicit memory.

• So we can show up for that five year old self who's scared and hiding and feels unsafe and if we can create safety.

  • It doesn't matter that it's 40 years later.

    • We can internalize more safety from that part of us.

Mothering while healing

Melissa: So often as mothers, we aren't given the tools to do these things for ourselves. That's why we're reparenting ourselves. That's why we're working through this stuff.

But then our kids can trigger these unhealed parts within us.

And there’s this pressure to show up in this way that wasn't modeled for us, for our children- in reparenting ourselves. It's really challenging. Can you speak to that experience?

Britt: Yeah. It can be challenging, right? And this is, I think, what we're talking about when we talk about generational trauma and being the cycle breaker in your family line, creating new experiences and new patterns.

I'm finding that there are different seasons of life with my children that get harder and not so hard. And that reflects, when I look at my own timeline of my earlier years, the kind of turmoil or experience I was experiencing in those years, which I find very interesting.

The good news is, even if we grew up in an environment without a secure attachment. Without a caregiver who was physically and emotionally present enough, who was attuned and responsive in a way that was regulating. Who when you got upset, knew how to comfort and soothe you rather than putting you in time out or leaving you alone.

That likely means that you had to provide that for yourself.

And although, yes, you carry on the trauma, you also carry on the resilience and the healing that your system had to acquire in order to survive.

And so that's the reframe and the way that I like to think about it. I can show up as the present embodied, compassionate parent that I am today, because that's how I had to show up for myself as a child.

So how do we show up for ourselves when we didn't have a healthy response?

That's a fantastic question. So what you're talking about is the subconscious, the implicit patterns or the impulses, kind of like muscle memory.

Again, trauma doesn't come back as a memory. It comes back as a response.

So those responses are subconscious, muscle memory to whatever it is that triggered you.

Essentially your system is stuck in the past.

So what can we do now in the present?

You can give your system:

1. experience

2. and evidence.

And that's why we call it somatic experiencing. Giving ourselves new experiences and evidence that it's okay to react opposite to that muscle memory.

Do that in small, subtle moments, like:

1. visualizing your recent experience

2. noticing your body- how it felt, the sensations

3. be with it for a bit

4. and then visualize you take a different approach.

We're not working with trauma. We're not going back to childhood. We're working with a recent experience in your daily life to show your system a different option.

That's why we say: we have to show not tell your nervous system because it shifts through experience and feeling, not through talking and thinking.

Knowing that your system can experience something different, starts to break up that muscle memory and impulse.

Somatic Experiencing vs. Talk Therapy

In talk therapy, I feel like we always go straight into the wound but somatic healing, and especially somatic experiencing, is quite the opposite.

We start on the outer edges of your trauma and activation.

• Activation meaning- let's say you have a nervous system that's really prone to the fight response. So you lash out a lot, you feel angry, frustrated, you go off on your kids, you go off on the dog. You just can't break free from this anger that's always around.

• We have to recognize that the nervous system is stuck in a state of overwhelm, where things felt like too much, too fast, too soon. So in working with the system, we want to do that in a way that feels gentle and what we call titrated.

  • Titration just means small baby steps. It's a term that was coined by Peter Levine but taken from chemistry. We want small, subtle changes.

We want to stretch your nervous system not stress it.

So we do not go back into the trauma narrative. Instead, think about it like a trauma vortex or tornado.

• At the very middle of that vortex is the most intense centrifugal force.

  • That's where the highest activation that is stuck in your system is. That’s the core wound or the root experience- the trauma.

We don't want to jump right into the deep end. We want to work the outer edges of that trauma vortex, the tornado.

So we’d:

1. Start with that recent experience.

2. And then maybe we go into another one that felt a little bit more activating

3. and then another one

4. and then another one.

   1. i.e. That one time when my mom crossed my boundary with my kids last year.

      1. So we're getting more and more intense until we get to this place where we get to the core wound.

And because your system has had so much practice being with anger in a way that feels safe and titrated, by the time you get to processing your core wound, it no longer feels overwhelming or charged.

Think of the nervous system like a pressure cooker.

When you have a fight or flight response that is stuck within the system, that means all that adrenaline and the cortisol is stuck within the body and the physiology.

That cortisol and adrenaline, over time, if not released, like a pressure cooker, creates chronic stress. Which creates mental illness, physical illness, emotional distress.

If you were to just blow off that lid, that would feel like way too much.

That's why we avoid it. Or if it's stuck, it's seeping or billowing out. That’s when we lash out or have panic attacks or we shut down.

So we either explode or implode.

What we want to do, through the somatic lens, is we allow the system and that lid to be slowly opened and release a little bit, release a little bit.

So we're slowly seeping out and expelling, or what we call discharging, all that survival energy that's keeping us stuck.

And when we finally allow all that to be expelled from the system, then we come back into a state of homeostasis, which is wholeness and vitality, rather than this stuckness and the stagnation and being stuck in the responses of the past.

Do we ever actually get to the, the core of it all?

Do we heal that trauma, or is it more about us just being in a different relationship with it?

Britt: Yeah, I believe it's both. The tagline of somatic experiencing is, completing the incomplete experience.

So, when we come to this moment of the core wound, we work and we're finally at this place where we can now start to talk about the trauma.

However, that doesn't mean that what triggers those experiences will disappear.

I’m still triggered by associations that my brain makes or my body makes to my experiences. And I still feel that activation. I still feel those younger parts of me.

But it's relating to them with more compassion, clarity and understanding rather than shaming them or judging them, right?

Melissa: It sounds like you learned how to be with it rather than lost in the armor?

Britt: Yeah, exactly. And it's interesting that you say that because, I share in my story about this concrete bottom moment. (Listen to Britt’s full story at minute 34 of this episode.)

I went before the judge, when I was getting released from jail and she knew who I was because I had a very public trial just 30 days prior from my assault.

She said: I know who you are, we're going to drop your charges, but you need to learn to live with your pain better.

She didn't say you need to learn to get over it or get past it. But that you need to learn to live with it. And that really changed everything.

So, that’s what we're trying to do. Is allow ourselves to be with the experience of the body rather than out of it.

This is what really made the difference for me, the combination of body based healing with therapy.

Healing is not a blanket approach. It's going to look so different for everyone, but I do think having a combination between bottom up and top down approaches can be most beneficial.

It changes your patterns, but it also creates greater resilience within your system.

Connect with Britt

Free Trauma Healing Mini-Course

The Body First Healing Program

Instagram

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P.S. Craving a safe space to reparent yourself with other ADHD moms who get it? Check out my community here on Substack.