Body-First Healing Podcast

6 Somatic Healing Misconceptions & Where to Begin

• Britt Piper • Episode 43

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This week, we’re bringing back a listener favorite replay that offers a deeper look into the personal journey that led Britt to somatic healing. In this episode, she shares more of her story, from the trauma she lived through to the turning point that changed the course of her healing and helped her understand the nervous system in a completely new way. Britt also unpacks 6 common somatic healing misconceptions, including what this work is and is not, why healing does not always feel good, and how to begin reconnecting with your body in a way that feels grounded, safe, and sustainable. If you’re new to somatic healing or have felt confused by your healing process, this is a powerful place to start.


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SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the Body First Healing Podcast. I'm Britt Piper, Survivor Turn Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Aut. 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, and welcome back to the Body First Healing Podcast. For those of you who are new here, welcome, welcome. I am Britt Piper. I'm an SCP, somatic experiencing practitioner, and author and creator of the trauma recovery program Body First Healing. Today's topic is going to be somatic healing misconceptions. So I'm going to start off by sharing a little bit about my own healing moments. I'm going to debunk some of the most common misconceptions that I see in the mainstream somatic world. And then I'm going to give you some pointers and some tips, some direction on where to start if

My Survivor Story

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you're ready to really start diving into this work. So I want to start off today, guys, just sharing, oh man, a personal moment with you all. And this moment, I feel like, is really a reflection of a time in my life that I thought that I was failing horribly in my healing and in my recovery. And hindsight's always 2020. That moment was not a moment of failing. It was actually an incredible moment for breakthrough and for recovery. So I share pretty openly, not just on social media, but I talk about it in my book, Body First Healing, about my experience of being a survivor of sexual assault. So when I was 20 years old, I was sexually assaulted by a stranger who helped me change my flat tire. And following the assault, the man was apprehended. But we went through a nearly two-year grueling trial process. And I often say that the trial process, I feel like, was in some ways even more traumatizing than the assault itself, because it was like constant exposure therapy. And let me walk you through what I mean by that. So this man had been in and out of the prison system his entire life. He knew how to work the system. And because he knew that he didn't have a case, because he knew that the evidence was stacked against him and he was going to be convicted, he was going to get an extreme sentence, he used the only strategy that he and his defense team knew how to use, which was to continue or postpone the trial so many times strategically so that I would eventually give up. It was like an emotional beatdown over a two-year period. And that was really hard because every time the trial was postponed, they call it a continuance, and this happened nine times over two years. Every time that happened, that meant that I had to essentially go through like a dress rehearsal for trial. I had to meet with my legal team, I had to listen back to the tape statements, go through the depositions, practice being on the witness stand. That meant that two years, nine times over a two-year period, I had to relive every graphic detail of that night. And that was brutal, to say the least. And so during that two-year period, my body and my nervous system went into such a dissociative, numb, nothingness feeling. And I remember thinking to myself, when we finally go to trial, because I am determined to go to trial, I'm not going to give up. When we go to trial, when he is convicted, when he is sentenced, then I will come back into my aliveness again. I will feel joy again. I will feel present in my life and in my body, and I'll be back to me. And what actually happened after he was convicted and then sentenced for 60 years is that I didn't experience joy. I experienced the most intense amount of grief and anger that I had ever experienced in my life outside of losing my brother. And the anger and the resentment and the horror, I mean, the things that I felt in my body that started to emerge as my nervous system started to thaw out and come out of this dissociated state, it was so intense that the only thing I knew how to do was to try and numb and escape it through alcohol, intense consumption of alcohol. And it got so bad to the point where I ended up in a jail cell because of an alcohol-related incident, not even 30 days after that sentencing. And I, of course, go into detail about this much more in my book. So I won't, you know, talk about it too much here. But that was a moment where I'm sitting here in a jail cell. I'm at my, you know, quintessential rock bottom. I call it my concrete bottom now. And I'm thinking to myself, how did I get here? You know, this is the worst point in my life. I am literally at rock bottom. But looking back now, you know, 14 years removed from that experience, I can recognize that that was my nervous system's way of coming back into my aliveness. What happened and how I ended up in that jail cell is that I was out with a partner who was drinking and driving. I always say that should give you a really good indication of where I was at at the time in my life. He got pulled over and arrested. And when the police officers went to pull me out of the car, in my impaired state, I had a flashback of the night of my assault of a man of a stranger pulling me out of a car and I snapped. And my nervous system went back into the fight response that I never got to complete when the assault happened. And that's how I ended up in a jail cell with two counts of battery on an officer, one count of resisting arrest. And what I didn't know in the moment was that that was my nervous system trying to complete what it couldn't back then. And that was an important and a pivotal moment in my recovery. And in the reflective moments of that season of life, I can recognize that although on paper, literally on paper, you know, I'm sitting here with a potential conviction, the judge dropped the charges, by the way, because she knew who I was and she told me to live with my trauma better. And I again walked through all of this in my book in much more detail. But reflecting on that now, my body was trying to do what it knew how to do. And it was trying to process and to release some of that pent-up survival energy that had gotten stuck and thwarted in my body and my nervous system. And it made sense that that happened after the trial came to an end because I was no longer facing, you know, this, oh, I might see him again in trial. I might see him again, you know, face to face and in person, which was a really terrifying concept to sit with in my body. There was all this anticipatory anxiety. And so once that passed, it's like my nervous system and my body was finally, finally like, we can breathe, we're safe. And I think that that is often what confuses people when they get into healing, is that it doesn't always feel good. And often when we start to become embodied, what emerges and what we're confronted with is a lot of the uncomfortable feelings, the messiness of what we never allowed ourselves or what we were never allowed to feel the first time around. And so again, I look back now and I'm like, yeah, that was actually a really important moment in my healing. And I wish that that could have happened in a much more titrated and a much more safe environment, maybe within the four walls of a therapy room and you know, not in a jail cell. But again, it goes back to that realization and that concept that I was not failing. It's just that I was finally feeling safe enough to feel, which is huge. So the first misconception that we have, and I

Misconception 1: Somatic healing is about feeling good.

SPEAKER_00

feel like this is probably honestly the most common, and that is that somatic healing is about feeling good. It's about doing the nervous system routines and the practices and the vagus nerve stimulation and the cold plunges and all of these things to regulate your nervous system to feel good. Although that's great, somatic healing is not about feeling good. The truth is, somatic healing is about getting good at feeling both what feels pleasant or good and what feels unpleasant or not good. In particular, I am a somatic experiencing practitioner. Soma means of the body. And so in somatic experiencing, we help you to better be with the experience of your body, both good and bad. Now, I will say that the beautiful thing about this work is that we often start with creating more of an ability to feel good, to feel things that feel good, feel safe, what we call our glimmers. And we start with that as a baseline in the somatic healing world. The more that we can feel good and alive and present and attuned to what's around us, the deeper the capacity we actually have to be with the things that don't feel good. So we call this pendulation, okay? And this is a term that we use in SE. And just imagine it like a grandfather clock, okay? Your nervous system has a biorhythm that goes back and forth all day long between deactivation, which is rest and digest, and then the grandfather clock pendulates to the other side to activation, which is fight, flight, shutdown, freeze, fawn, functional freeze. We call this your biorhythm. And a healthy, regulated, resilient biorhythm, a healthy, regulated, resilient nervous system goes back and forth, pendulates back and forth roughly 100 times a day. In the polyvagal world, you can imagine it like the nervous system ladder. So the nervous system ladder at the top of the ladder is your rest and digest state called your ventral vagal state. In the middle of the ladder is your sympathetic state of fight or flight, and at the bottom is your dorsal state of shutdown, kind of like a freeze response. Now, in the polyvagal world, a healthy nervous system is one that we call a flexible nervous system. That is a regulated, resilient nervous system. And by flexibility, we mean that you can move up and down that ladder. Again, think of kind of like pendulating. You move up and down all day long without getting stuck, roughly 100 times a day. So, again, the goal is not to stay at the top of the ladder and rest and digest. The goal is not to stay over here on the left-hand side of the grandfather clock. That's a broken grandfather clock. The goal is to be able to move in and out of what feels good and not good without getting stuck because that is the reality of our experience every day. Every day we have moments of stress, moments of moments of happiness, moments of needing to shut down, moments of needing to be with anxiety, moments of needing to be with a little bit of frustration, moments of needing to be with love and connectedness and presence. All of these are part of our lived experience. And so when we talk about somatic healing and somatic experiencing, it's again having the ability to be in your body and to be with yourself. It's not just about feeling good all the time, it's about getting good at feeling everything.

Misconception 2: Embodiment equals comfort.

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Now, this takes me into misconception number two. Embodiment equals comfort. Right? So when we talk about like embodied practices, we're often thinking of like grounding and breath work and meditation and orienting, and those are just one tool of embodiment. But embodiment is not just comfort, true embodiment equals capacity, having the capacity to be able to be with comfort and discomfort. And we do that by working really slowly with the body and really slowly with the nervous system. Peter Levine, the developer of somatic experiencing, he says that slower is faster. And so it's not about just being with this constant calm, but staying with discomfort when it feels tolerable enough. And so think of it like riding waves, right? And you can think of this like the window of tolerance, which we use a lot in the therapy world to talk about our ability to tolerate stress and discomfort. But there are peaks and there are valleys, there are ebbs and flows where sometimes we're like on top of the clouds, and sometimes we are just in the deepest rut. And so when we slow down that experience, the waves actually start to spread out a little bit and become not so choppy, not so volatile and crazy, but they become more tolerable. Right. So sometimes embodiment is less about comfort and more about our capacity to stay with both the good and the not so good.

Misconception 3: Feeling worse means you're doing it wrong.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, misconception number three. Feeling worse means that you are doing it wrong. Feeling worse doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong. It means that you're becoming whole. It means that you have more of a capacity now for your body to experience all of the embodied experiences of life, both activation and deactivation. And similar to what I explained in my story of coming out of this season where I was in such this dissociated state, I was really armored up and muscling through and functioning, but feeling completely numb. And then, oh, he's put away in prison for nearly the rest of his life. And it's like the armor came off. And what I was then confronted with was everything underneath that armor that was waiting for me to witness it, to hold it, to experience it. And so what can often confuse people is when they start to get into this work and into the program and they're like, why am I starting to experience anxiety? Why am I experiencing anger? Why am I crying? Why, why is my body having these symptoms? I'm having a hard time sleeping. Oh, my digestive symptoms are are like really flaring up. And what that actually means is that your body is starting to come alive again. And it's starting to finally process what it couldn't process back then. And the less that we war against those things, the less that we resist them and hold them with this understanding and this attunement and this permission to do what it knows how to do, the quicker that we actually move through those cycles. And so what we find is that what we resist in the body is just going to persist. So the less that we war against the body, the less that we resist it, the less that these symptoms will persist. And so ultimately, here, this takeaway is to attempt to shift your perspective of seeing your symptoms as setbacks, to instead seeing them as signs of thawing out and reconnecting to the parts of you that have kind of been shut off, that have been placed on the shelf and that are now ready to

Misconception 4: We Release Trauma

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be experienced and processed. So this kind of naturally weaves into our next misconception, which is that we release trauma. The truth is we don't necessarily release trauma, we integrate it. Okay. And I want to just walk you through on a very basic level here, just the explanation of what a charge and dish discharge cycle is, or what we call our stress response cycle. Okay, so trauma can be defined as any experience that overwhelms the nervous system's capacity to cope. And when that happens, the nervous system can get stuck in a stress response cycle or aka survival mode. It can get stuck in a habitual or a chronic fight response, flight response, shutdown, functional freeze, fawn. And so healing then is about getting unstuck from survival mode. But the stuckness that we're talking about is the stress physiology that happens when we go into a stress or threat response cycle. So think of it as a circle. At the top of the circle, where the cycle begins, you're in your state of neutral, kind of like rest and digest, right? And then what happens is you have a neurosceptive cue of danger, aka something triggers your system. Okay, and you go into fight, flight, shutdown, freeze, fawn, functional freeze. But when this happens, the body becomes inundated with stress hormones, survival hormones, like adrenaline and cortisol. And adrenaline and cortisol are your mobilizing hormones that mobilize you to fight or flee. Now, if fighting or fleeing is not an option, or if we push down the emotional charge of fight, which is anger, or we push down the emotional charge of flee or flight, which is usually fear, right? So we push down the anxiety, we push away the fear. If we suppress those emotions, then what happens is the adrenaline and cortisol stays trapped within the system. Okay. But if we allow the body to be with the adrenaline and cortisol and allow the body to discharge those stress hormones, which usually happens through sweating, through mild trembling or shaking, through crying, through vocalizing, through groaning, through movement. These are all the ways that the body discharges adrenaline and cortisol. If we do not allow that to happen, then what happens is our nervous system stays stuck. So part of the somatic healing journey is releasing some of that adrenaline and cortisol. Okay. But another part of it is also creating a deeper container to be with those stress hormones when they come back into the body when we're triggered by that experience again. So let me give you an example. For instance, during my assault, there was a moment where my nervous system and my body did go into a fight response. And I tried to fight back against my perpetrator, but I was overpowered. And so that fight response became thwarted. And I had all of this pent-up adrenaline and cortisol, all of this pent-up survival hormones within my physiology following my assault. And during that season following my assault, there were moments where I'd get incredibly angry and violent. And it would always happen when I was drinking. And my kind of natural personality or in my nature, I'm not really a violent person at all. I'm not a rageful, angry person. I'd say that I always had a much softer personality. And so people around me, including myself, were very confused by this newfound Britney that emerged after my assault. And of course, it was that fight response that came to completion during the time that I spent, you know, before I went to jail when I fought back against those police officers. But all that stress physiology was there. And I love to use the analogy of a pressure cooker. Okay. Think of a pressure cooker. I had all of these stress hormones just billowing and billowing and building up and not getting released, discharged until I exploded, right? So we often find that we explode or implode. And what we do in somatic healing is we allow you to be with gentle, tolerable moments of activation so that your nervous system can start to slowly and gently lift the lid of that pressure cooker to just let out a little bit of activation, discharge the adrenaline and cortisol, and close it back down. And what's great is you don't actually have to work with the trauma. You don't have to go back to the moments of hurt in order to heal, right? I did not necessarily have to actually fight back against a male in order to heal. As I said earlier, I could have done that within the walls of a therapy room, working with a somatic therapist in order to do that. I could have been asked the question, hey Brittany, what's something that frustrated you recently? And maybe I start to share a moment where I got cut off on the road while driving and it really frustrated me. And then my somatic experiencing practitioner is like, I'm noticing the clenching in your jaw. There's some heat that I can see, there's some redness in your face, and your spine has lifted up. There's some fight energy here, right? And I start to feel that in my body, and the sweat starts to come. And wow, I am gently starting to release some of that built up stress hormones that are here. While at the same time, I am creating a capacity, a deeper well for my nervous system to be able. Able to be with moments of anger, to be with moments of this activation, this fight response that I've so needed, but that feels so overwhelming that I couldn't be with back then. So I often say it's not that the anger was too big, it's that my capacity to be with the anger following my assault was too small. Right. And so we can work by building up that capacity, by growing that nervous system muscle. And so although we do in some ways release trauma, we're also integrating it. Because here's the thing: you can't just delete your past. Your body will always, always remember your history and what you went through. And in moments where your body or your nervous system feel like, oh, that thing is going to happen again, your body's going to have a response to that. Your nervous system is going to have a response to that. And these are the moments where we can integrate, where we can have that greater capacity now to be with a new experience. Maybe instead of running away, maybe instead of shutting down, maybe now I can be with some of that healthy aggression in my body. So again, it's not just releasing trauma, it's also integrating

Misconception 5: Somatic healing is only for trauma.

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it. Somatic healing misconception number five is that somatic healing is only for trauma survivors. The truth. It is not just for trauma survivors, it's for anyone with a nervous system, which is anyone in the world. Which is anyone that's alive. Okay, so nervous system regulation, somatic healing, it is good across the board for so many different things. It benefits not just your um ability to be with stress, it, you know, it creates greater resilience. It also helps with relational repair. The way that we show up in our relationships to others is definitely nervous system-based. There's also this huge interplay between the nervous system and all of our other working organ and body systems, such as our immune system, our respiratory system, our cardiovascular system, our endocrine system, our uh reproductive system, digestive system. And so when the nervous system is stuck in dysfunction and dysregulation, everything else is going to experience the same thing. So, nervous system and somatic healing is not just for trauma healing, it's also just for general overall well-being and living from a place of vitality, regulation, and resilience. Here's our last misconception

Misconception 6: Somatic healing is "woo woo"

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before we get into where to start. So, this last misconception is that somatic healing is like this woo-woo thing. And I'm seeing this a lot more. I have recently been talking about how I'm a Christian and I shared about how I went to ministry school right after getting married. And I have a ministerial degree. Like I went to a two-year ministry school alongside my husband. I served on staff at my church, and I don't know why it feels like this controversial topic, but I've been receiving so many messages of people being like, How are you a believer, but also a somatic healer? Can you tell me about the intersection of somatic work and Christianity and religion? And I feel like there's this misconception that like somatic healing is energy work or Reiki work or woo-woo work, which I'm not speaking against at all. I just think there's kind of like this mainstream misconception that somatic healing gets clumped in with just like energy work. And when we talk about survival energy, what we're talking about is our physiology, right? We're talking about the hormones that I was just referring to, our survival energy of adrenaline and cortisol and our stress physiology. And so I guess, you know, I could probably talk about this for a whole episode, you know, how I feel like the somatic healing shows up in the Bible a lot. But I think I'll ultimately just leave it with this short and sweet thing. And that is that somatic healing, in particular, somatic experiencing, is a naturalistic trauma resolution modality. And I'm gonna underscore that word naturalistic. I love that that is in the definition of the work that I do because what we do is we aim to position and to posture people to look inward to the natural abilities, the innate capacities that the body has to self-heal, to self-organize, to self-regenerate. We, as a living biological organism, I believe, were perfectly designed by a creator to heal. I believe that we have everything inside of us to heal. And one of the most beautiful things to witness in this work is when people start to become so wrapped up in this awe and reverence. I'm getting emotional just talking about it, this awe and reverence for how they were beautifully, brilliantly, intricately designed and how capable they are for self-healing. And so, in my opinion, and of course, this is such a personal belief and my spiritual practice, everyone is different here, but in my personal opinion, I feel like there is no greater testament to our creator or to God's love than this kind of work. We're not reaching outside of ourselves to find healing. We are looking inward and seeing that there is nothing, there is nothing in this world that nature can give us that God has not already designed healing for. All right, so

Where to Begin with Somatic Healing

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now that we've ended on that nice deep reflective note, I want to get into kind of like the next steps. Okay, if you're really interested in getting into somatic healing, nervous system work, where can you start? So I'm gonna give you just some tangible things that you can start to do in your everyday life. I first just want to set the tone here. Somatic healing is less about what you know, it's less about being an expert, it's less about being educated on the nervous system, although that isn't incredibly important and helpful. And it's more about can you become embodied? Can you experience this work? Okay, that is going to be the greatest tool. It's not so much what you know, but what you have the capacity to feel. So, with that in mind, let's get into the first thing that you can start to do. Notice your body once a day. We call this a tracking practice. Okay. Can you start to pay attention to what your body is showing and telling you? Maybe you're starting every day with your long exhaustive to-do list without checking in with your body. Maybe your posture is showing you that you're exhausted. Maybe the way that your stomach is in knots is telling you that you actually don't want to do that thing that you put on there. Maybe the dissociation and the spaciness and the numbness that you're feeling is showing you that you need more time to be present and rested rather than hustling all the time. So that is number one. Start to notice your body once a day. And what you can do is you can set an alarm, set a timer, and when that timer goes off, I just want you to observe the body without feeling the need to fix it, without feeling the need to guide it, to redirect it. What you're just doing is just noticing. Okay. There's nothing that you need to fix. Just notice what your body is experiencing. What emotions are present, what sensations can you notice? What do you notice about your posture? How's your body temperature, heart rate, how are your muscles? So that is your tracking practice. Number two, which I kind of already said this a little bit, stop fixing and start listening. Okay. In somatic and nervous system healing work, we are all about creating safety and no longer trying to control the body. That moment that you feel anxious, that's okay. Can that be there? That moment that you feel frustrated, can that be there? That moment that you feel like you just need to check out, can that moment be here? The more that we attune to ourselves with this perspective of I will stay with you even in your discomfort, the less that we war against ourselves, the quicker the body can move through some of the necessary discomforts that it experiences in a very uncomfortable world. Okay, so stop fixing, start listening. Number three, avoid quick fix promises. Okay, somatic healing takes time. We are often working with decades-old or years-old patterns and wiring in the brain and muscle memory, right? The way that you hold your breath when that person calls, or the way that you avert your eyes and look away when someone asks you if it's a yes or a no, right? Uh, the way that we fawn, the way that we shut down, all of these things are patterns. They are muscle memory. And think about like changing the way that you brush your teeth. Like if you start brushing your teeth with your opposite hand, that's not going to happen overnight. You're not going to get to perfection overnight. Okay. It's going to take time. And so my best advice is steer clear from any person, any program, any kind of format or method that tells you that you can heal or do these things within 30 days or a couple of days. That's not how it works. It's going to take time. And again, Peter says slower is faster when working with the nervous system. Okay, so give yourself realistic expectations. Number four, you want to build capacity, not calm. And you do this by learning to stay with discomfort. One of the ways that I learned how to do this because it felt really uncomfortable at first. I had grown up essentially learning how to not be in my body. Um, I was very dissociated for most of my life. And so um, opening myself up to feeling was really difficult in the beginning. And so, one way that you can really titrate this practice of learning to stay with discomfort is by noticing duality. And I'll give you an example of that. So, as I'm with this discomfort, this tension, this rock or this lump in my chest or in my throat, can I also notice another area of my body that feels a little bit more comfortable to be with, a little bit easier to be with? And maybe that's my sit bones, maybe that's my feet on the ground, maybe that's my hands as they're clasping together. And then can I oscillate my attention back and forth between the discomfort and what feels easier? The discomfort and what feels easier. And when you do that, you again are giving yourself permission little by little to allow the discomfort to stay. You're not running away from it, you're giving it a little bit of space, but in a way that feels titrated for you. So again, we're trying to build capacity, not just calm, by learning to stay with discomfort and not avoiding escaping or running away. Now, the last place that I would recommend starting, I feel like I would be failing miserably as a practitioner if I didn't, of course, mention this, but you can start with my body first healing book. So my book is a really great deep dive into this work. It gives you a full somatic roadmap, it gives you the education, it gives you, it gives you the experiential practices to do. So I would definitely recommend getting the book, Body First Healing. I do have a mini course that is free. It's a two-day mini course, and that's a great starting point. You can find that at bodyfirsthealing.com. I'm going to drop that all in the show notes. And of course, you can join me in the Body First Healing six-month trauma and somatic program. All right, my friend, I hope that you found this episode to be so very supportive, maybe even enlightening or encouraging, or hopefully it gives you some of your own direction to follow as you get into this somatic healing work. Real healing asks for more of you than just surviving. It asks you to receive beauty, to receive safety, to receive connection, and to receive yourself just as you are. Remember that if you love this episode, that you can always share it. You can find me over on Instagram or TikTok at Heal With Brit. You can join me in the Body First Healing program, grab my book. And just as a final reminder, remember that healing begins when we return home to ourselves. I will see you next week here on the Body First Healing podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in to 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.