Body-First Healing Podcast

Q&A: Intrusive Thoughts, Expanding Capacity & Learning to Receive Support

• Britt Piper • Episode 30

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Why do intrusive thoughts feel so terrifying? How do you actually build capacity instead of just trying to stay calm? In this month’s Q&A, Britt answers your most honest questions—about expanding nervous system capacity, receiving support without shame, understanding intrusive thoughts through a somatic lens, navigating abandonment wounds, and what support through grief really looks like. She breaks down how trauma lives in the body, why activation isn’t the problem, and how titration, co-regulation, and reducing background stress gently increase resilience over time. Plus, learn red and green flags you can look for if you’re interested in working with a somatic practitioner! This episode offers practical education, emotional reassurance, and grounded tools to help you feel less alone in your patterns and more empowered in your healing. 


 Enrollment for the Somatic Practitioner training at the Body-First Healing Institute opens Monday, March 23rd. Learn more here: bodyfirsthealing.com/somatic-certificate


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Body First Healing Q&A 

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Body First Healing Podcast. I'm Britt Piper. Survivor turns somatic experiencing practitioner and author. If you feel stuck in old patterns, overwhelmed by your emotions or disconnected from yourself, you're in the right place. Each week, I'll share practical somatic tools, personal stories and conversations to support you in building a more regulated and embodied life.

Because you can't talk your way through healing. You have to feel your way through. Together we'll explore what it means to come back to yourself and create a life that feels safe enough to fully live in. I am so glad that you're here.

​

 Hello, my friend. Welcome back to The Body First Healing Podcast. I am your host, Britt Piper, somatic [00:01:00] experiencing practitioner, educator, trainer, and author. Oh, I'm so excited for today's episode. It is one of my favorites. We are doing our monthly. Q and a solo episode Today, I am answering your questions that you sent in to Instagram and just to the show in general.

Thank you guys so much for all of these awesome questions. Now, before we dive in today, I just want to read a review that honestly. Moved me so deeply. Um, this one is from Heidi Lou and the title is Grateful and it says, I truly love all of the content that Brit creates, and I'm just so grateful for it.

I've been a part of her Body First Healing program over the past few months, and it has been life changing. Hi, Heidi. Heidi is actually now in the somatic practitioner training as well, so I am so glad to have a continued touchpoint into this work every week through this podcast, [00:02:00] Heidi, Lou, Heidi, Heidi, thank you.

Thank you so much for the love. Oh man. So that phrase, continued touchpoint. Honestly, you guys is exactly why I created this podcast. Like healing is not a one-time event. And you guys hear me say that all the time. It is rhythm, it is repetition. It is a lifelong journey of coming back to safety and coming back to yourself again and again and again.

And so if this podcast has supported you. Or helped you feel less alone or giving you language to something that perhaps you couldn't name before. Then please make sure that you subscribe, follow, leave, a review. It truly helps this work to reach the people who I feel like are quietly searching for answers in the dark.

Okay, let's move into your questions. So this month's q and a has a bit of a [00:03:00] theme. Okay. We're gonna talk about intrusive thoughts, abandonment wounds, grief, capacity, support, becoming support. Um, and I just love how all of these topics really just kind of weave in together, 

All right guys, let's start with our first question. It says, seeing that you have so many things to pour into, how big is your team and who supports you? 

So I wanted to start here because I feel like there is this quiet belief that strong women, strong leaders, or healers or entrepreneurs, that they are expected to just carry it all by themselves.

And that belief is often rooted in survival, and it was one that I definitely used to lead with. When I tell you that I was a one man band for years, I really was.I was the practitioner, I was the speaker, I was the social media team, I was the marketing, I was the [00:04:00] sales director, I was the finance team.

I was the website designer. I was everything because I thought that I had to carry it all on my own. But now I do have a wonderful team that has really supported me, especially in the past five years, so that I could do the deeper work.

So I have a podcast manager. I have operations support. I have community moderators inside the Body First Healing program. I have legal and financial advisors. I have creative support. And I also have trusted practitioners and mentors that I still sit with myself. And I wanna say just something really I feel like is important here.

The growth of my business and my team has directly mirrored the growth of my nervous system's capacity to receive support. Okay. Those things are not separate. It is not coincidence. [00:05:00] Many of us built our identity around being the capable one, the over functioner, hello me, the one who figures it out on their own, who doesn't need any help.

But what I found over the years after many seasons of burnout is that hyper independence is often a trauma response when you had to become self-sufficient too early. Your nervous system learns that relying on others equals risk. Right? So someone like me who comes from these deeper fears of abandonment because of separation at birth, because of attachment, wounding. I learned to go it alone. I learned to tighten. I learned to over prepare to overdeliver and just anticipate every single need before it emerged, and that strategy definitely worked for a while.

You know, I, I will say it worked for a while until I found myself with my second child. Five days after giving [00:06:00] birth, laying in a bed with my baby nursing on a Zoom meeting. So what expanded my capacity more than anything was allowing for interdependence without.

Interpreting it as weakness, which meant that I could rely on myself and I could rely on others. And so if you're listening to this and you're an entrepreneur or someone who is leading a business or leading a team and you're exhausted or just leading a home.

I want you to ask yourself gently, where am I trying to prove that I can do this alone? Because again, nervous systems are not designed to operate in isolation. There's a reason why our rest and digest state of ventral is known as our safety and connection state, right? Capacity grows in connection.

Okay. So while we're on the theme of capacity, that's a good little segue [00:07:00] into our next question. So the next question is, what are your top tips for improving capacity for nervous system regulation? So, oh my gosh. I feel like this question could truly be an entire series. Okay, let's start here. Capacity is not about eliminating activation or stress.

Okay. I know that's like what we commonly think. It is not about being calm forever. Capacity is not about never getting triggered again. Instead, it is about how much activation your nervous system can move through and return from without fragmenting, without getting overwhelmed, without shutting down.

Let me use an analogy here. Okay. Imagine two glasses of water. One is small, one is large. If you pour the same amount into both, the small one is going to overflow quickly, right? But the large one holds it. It [00:08:00] contains it. So we're not trying to remove intensity from life, right? That's the water. What we're trying to do is increase the size of our internal container, our capacity, right?

When there's a moment that. Life feels overwhelming or when things feel really frustrating. It's not that the anger or the frustration is too big, it's that our capacity to handle it in the moment is too small. Okay, so how do we expand that container, that capacity? Well, first is gonna be titration. Okay.

Titration is small, manageable doses of activation or stress. Discomfort in the body, followed by return to resource or return to a moment of settling regulation. So this is the foundation of somatic experiencing in somatic experiencing, or SE for short. We don't dive [00:09:00] into the deepest trauma first. We don't go into the deep end.

Okay. Through titration, we go into the shallow end, and we do that by tracking sensations. In micro doses, we will touch into the edge of activation, and then we pendulate back to something neutral or pleasant, which is our resource. Now, why do we do this? Why do we practice pendulation? We practice pendulation because your nervous system learns through experience.

Not through education, that activation does not equal annihilation. Okay? If you were overwhelmed in the past and there was no safe return, then your body learned likely that intensity equals danger. So now how that shows up as a pattern or as a body pattern, is that even moderate activation. Can feel catastrophic like it can throw off your entire day.

[00:10:00] So titration teaches your system that you can feel activation and still survive. Okay, so first is titration. Second I would say is co-regulation. And I know I already just kind of touched on this a little bit in the last question, but I cannot overemphasize this. Okay. Your nervous system literally reorganizes in the presence of another regulated or even dysregulated nervous system.

It doesn't regulate and reorganize through just isolation alone, not through white knuckling. Even listening to this podcast can be a form of co-regulation. Okay? If my tone feels steady to you, then your vagus nerve is likely responding to that cue. But deeper work requires embodied relational presence.

Um, this can be a therapist, it can be a somatic [00:11:00] practitioner, a secure friend, a partner who's maybe emotionally available. Okay. Uh, and then third, I would say reducing background stress. Okay? You cannot build capacity if you are constantly flooded. Or surrounded by stress. So chronic sleep deprivation, constant relational conflict, financial instability.

Overcommitment

Toxic work environments, these are load bearing stressors and capacity expands when the baseline of stress decreases. And of course, I wanna add something nuanced here. Okay. Building capacity is not about becoming unshakeable. It is about increasing your ability to return.

So resilience is not the absence of activation. It is the speed and the softness of [00:12:00] recovery and inside the Body First Healing Program, we intentionally build this over months, like not just days. We do this by mapping your survival or your nervous system states. We identify where you go when you're stressed, you go to a fight response flight, shut down, freeze fawn, functional freeze.

And then we build resources specifically for your nervous system patterns. So this is how change really sticks over time by building new muscle memory, new procedural patterns, or body or nervous system patterns. 

All right, let's move into our next question. Can you explain intrusive thoughts from a somatic experiencing perspective and why they feel so terrifying? Especially when anxiety spirals. Example here would be fear of dying. Okay. First of all, thank you. For this question, um, it's such an important [00:13:00] one.

Intrusive thoughts are often misunderstood, as dangerous or as reflections of your true desires. But from a somatic perspective, 

intrusive thoughts are frequently cognitive attempts to interpret unresolved survival energy. Okay, so let's break that down. Your nervous system detects threat before your conscious mind does. Okay, and that detection is called neuroception, and this neuroception happens below our mind's conscious awareness.

So if your body mobilizes due to perceived threat, then your heart rate is going to increase, your breath will change. You'll have this surge of adrenaline, and then your mind wakes up and says. What is happening? [00:14:00] Okay, so the mind does not like ambiguity. So it creates a narrative. And that can sound like, what if I'm dying?

What if something is wrong? What if I, uh, lose control or hurts someone? Or this never stops and it spirals. Okay? So the thought is not the origin, the activation. In the nervous system in the body is so intrusive. Thoughts can feel terrifying because they're layered on top of sympathetic arousal. Okay? We know the sympathetic nervous system is the fight or flight response, which is really guided by those mobilizing hormones of adrenaline and cortisol.

And so when your body is already in survival mode. Your brain shifts into this more active threat scanning, and so it starts to look for danger everywhere, right? It's like sounding the alarm. [00:15:00] And I think what's most powerful here is that you cannot logic your way out of a physiological surge. And so although the symptom is cognitive, the solution is not cognitive.

Okay. Arguing with the thought will often just increase it. Fixating on the thought will often just increase it. So instead, we want to get curious about the thought by first working with the body. So a couple of ways that you can do that. First of all, can you feel your feet just pressing into the ground?

Okay. There's likely gonna be some mobilizing leaning forward, so engage those leg muscles. Allow some of the adrenaline and cortisol to move through the limbs usually goes through the arms and legs or our peripheral nervous system. Okay. Can you look around the room and maybe name five neutral objects just to bring yourself back into presence.[00:16:00] 

Um, can you extend your exhale just slightly longer than your inhale to just help slow down the nervous system? Okay. Think of it like you're putting your brake pedals on a bike that is going way too fast down a steep hill. And then another option here is can you press like your palms together and engage the muscles in your arms to give that activation somewhere to go?

Okay, so if it doesn't go through the legs, can we do it through the arms and hand? Now the reason that we do this is because when the body completes even just a small amount of survival response, the thought loses its fuel. Like that is the fuel that's guiding the thought and then of course, specifically around fear of dying during anxiety.

Um, I will say this is really common, and something that we explore quite a bit in the Body First Healing Program. So when sympathetic arousal spikes, okay, [00:17:00] and you're not used to that level of intensity, your brain can in interpret it as life threat. But it doesn't actually mean that you're dying, and it doesn't mean, we should also say that you want to die.

It means that your nervous system is mobilized. And over time as you build capacity and allow these waves to rise and fall without catastrophic interpretation, your system learns. This is uncomfortable. Yes, but it's also survivable. and that learning and that experiencing over time starts to rewire the loop.

All right. Moving into our next question, where can I find a somatic practitioner and what do I look for? Give me red flags and green flags. Okay. You. I love this question because finding the right somatic practitioner can truly, truly change your life. For me, it definitely did. [00:18:00] Let's start with some of the green flags.

So things to really look out for when you are first working with a somatic practitioner is, do they move slowly? That's number one. Next, do they check for consent? Do they track your nervous system moment to moment? Um, are they comfortable with silence? Sign of a good practitioner is one that's comfortable with silence so that the body can naturally do what it knows how to do.

Do they prioritize stabilization before processing trauma? So do they allow your nervous system to have capacity and to come into baseline and stabilization before you start to do any kind of trauma work? Um, another green flag. They'll often ask like, what are you noticing in your body right now? Okay, so they bring it back to sensation.

That felt sense. I would say some red flags could be that they push you into intense [00:19:00] emotional release. Or catharsis without building your resourcing first. Okay. Um, another one would be that they override your discomfort, right? They push you or force your, your system into activation when it's maybe not ready.

 they also might interpret dysregulation as resistance. They might seem more attached to emotional release than to safety. Okay. And I would say some questions that you can ask when you're first just starting to work with a new somatic practitioner, it could be, uh, how do you work with nervous system dysregulation in real time?

Another question could be, how do you ensure that sessions stay within my window of tolerance or my capacity? Um, and I also think it's important to ask like what formal training they've completed, and just how they maintain any kind of supervision or consultation or mentorship.

So ultimately, you know, trauma work, especially in the [00:20:00] somatic space, really requires humility. It requires pacing and skill. and having a practitioner whose nervous system is really the anchor for the clients that they're serving, so. Now. With that said, if you are listening to this and you're thinking, I wanna become that kind of practitioner, I just want to share with you guys here on the podcast that enrollment for the Somatic Practitioner training at the Body First Healing Institute for our next cohort opens next Monday, March 23rd.

And it closes on April 1st. Okay. So this is a live and experiential, not just educational training. that is five months of immersive nervous system education, attachment mapping, survival, state tracking, ethics, pacing, relational presence. Um, we do a lot of work in triads. So you are practicing the techniques that [00:21:00] you are learning.

 We do live demonstrations and we work to build your own capacity so that your nervous system becomes the anchor to regulate others. Now, I will just say that spots sold out very quickly last time. Um, and we already have limited availability for this upcoming cohort, which is gonna start in the summer.

So head to body first healing.com or just take a peek at the show notes to join the wait list and be notified when enrollment opens because again, it is likely going to sell out early.

So if you feel the call, just trust it. Okay. Next question. How do you heal the abandonment wounds? Okay, so abandonment wounds don't form because you're weak. Okay. That's something I had to tell myself for a really long time because it's something that I personally struggled with and I've talked about so openly here on the podcast, but Abandonment wounds form [00:22:00] because connection felt inconsistent, withdrawn, or we could say unsafe at a moment when you needed stability. So when that happens, the nervous system adapts, and that might mean that you became more hypervigilant, where you're always scanning for signs that someone is pulling away.

Um, you may over-function, like if I'm good enough, they won't leave. You may preemptively detach, which can sound like I'll leave first so I cannot be left. So the abandonment wound isn't about being alone, it's about being alone in distress. 

So healing this kind of pattern is going to happen in layers. Okay. First, awareness of the pattern without shame has to take place. I would say second, it would be creating corrective experiences or what we call disconfirming [00:23:00] experiences, so that might look like expressing a need. And then staying present for the response instead of immediately retreating, it might look like tolerating closeness without really like gripping and holding on.

Uh, it could also look like choosing partners and friendships who demonstrate consistency over intensity. Okay. That's important. And I would say that this is kind of the, the hard truth in all of it. Okay. Healing abandonment wounds requires relational risk. And I know that's not what you wanted to hear.

Okay? Because that can be terrifying. Believe me. I know. But we can heal it alone. Like we just can't. And you also can't heal it by abandoning yourself in the process. And so the work becomes kind of this dance of. Connection and self [00:24:00] integrity. and of course I just wanna mention here that inside the Body First Healing Program, we spend significant time mapping our attachment adaptations.

We have an entire module on it, and we don't do that just cognitively, but somatically. So questions you could ask yourself. Where does your body tighten? When someone pulls away, where do you collapse? Where do you over pursue? Because attachment is a form of muscle memory. It lives in the body. It is a form of procedural memory.

It's a pattern that was learned likely at a very early age, and when your nervous system experiences consistent, safe connection over time, which we practice in the program, it starts to reorganize and rewire, and it does that really slowly, and really steadily and powerfully.

Okay. Next question guys. How can you support yourself during [00:25:00] grief after a recent and big loss? So grief, I would say, my goodness, it's one of the most understood nervous system experiences because grief is not pathology. It is love metabolizing absence. Love metabolizing absence. So from a physiological nervous system perspective, grief oscillates between sympathetic activation and dorsal shutdown.

So here, you know, you may feel restless, you may feel like you're searching or unable to settle, and then suddenly. You feel heavy or numb or exhausted. So that is kind of that natural pendulation or oscillation between those two states. And it's your nervous system really kind of reorganizing around [00:26:00] relational rupture.

So support during grief. Can look like rhythm. Okay? Can you eat regularly even if your appetite is gone? Can you stay hydrated? Can you step outside daily? Can you let your body cry without having to analyze or understand it? Um, can you speak the name of the person or the thing that you lost? Grief that is suppressed often becomes stored activation or collapse grief that is allowed to move metabolizes. And I just wanna say this, if you feel like you're breaking, that doesn't mean that you're failing, okay? It means that you've loved, and the nervous system doesn't differentiate between physical and relational loss in the way that we think it does.

Attachment or relational rupture registers as threat to the body as disorientation. [00:27:00] So in the grief process, we have to really move slowly, okay? We increase co-regulation or support when we can. We reduce our expectations of ourselves, And we really allow time for the body and the nervous system to do its own kind of quiet work.

Okay? So all that to say, we don't heal grief by being strong. We really heal it by being supported, supported by ourselves, and supported by others. All right, you guys. Well, thank you so much for this week's questions. Thank you. Just for your vulnerability. For trusting me with the edges of your nervous system and just your life experiences.

Remember that if this episode really resonated with you, I would be so, so, so grateful if you would share it to your Instagram stories and tag me so that I can repost to you. I always love, love, love to do that. Comment on the Instagram post for this episode with questions that you want answered next month.

Okay? And I'll be keeping track of those. and then I wanna just close with this because [00:28:00] I know I mentioned it, but. I really just want to kind of reiterate here that the somatic practitioner training enrollment for summer of 2027 enrollment opens next Monday, March 23rd, and it's going to close April 1st.

Okay? So it's only open for like a week if you feel called to really deepen your understanding of the nervous system to hold others safely. And your own nervous system capacity. And to do this work with integrity and depth, then please head over to Body first healing.com. Or again, you can look at those show notes to join the wait list and be notified when enrollment opens.

Okay, again, spots sold out very quickly last time. We already have limited spots available and over 200 people already on the waiting list.

All right, my friends, that is going to bring our time to a close here this week on the Body First Healing Podcast. I will see you next time. Have a great one. 

Thank you so much for [00:29:00] tuning into The Body First Healing Podcast. If this episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you subscribed, left a review or shared it with someone that you love. I'll see you back here next week, and until then. Be gentle with yourself. You're doing the best you can with what you have, and that is more than enough.

Just a quick note, this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Always consult a qualified provider for personal support.