Body First Healing: Releasing Stress and Trauma with Britt Piper
This week I’m talking with Britt Piper, a somatic experiencing practitioner, trauma educator, and author of Body First Healing. Britt’s work focuses on understanding how trauma impacts the nervous system and brings both professional expertise and a deeply personal understanding of what it means to heal.
In our conversation, we start with Britt's story and then we dive into what somatic therapy actually looks like, how trauma can live in the body long after the mind “knows” we’re safe, and why the nervous system often gets stuck in survival mode. We also get into the science behind stress responses, intergenerational trauma, and practical ways to start listening to your body’s signals instead of fighting against them.
Also, just as a quick note before we get into it, today’s episode includes discussion of trauma, including mentions of sexual violence, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts. If these topics are sensitive for you, please take care while listening - feel free to skip ahead or pause when needed.
Books
Body First Healing by Britt Piper
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn
Therapy & Practitioner Resource
Somatic Experiencing International - https://traumahealing.org/
The Embody Lab - https://www.theembodylab.com/
Britt’s Body First Healing Program - https://www.bodyfirsthealing.com/
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/234
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
William Curb: I'm excited to have you on the show. This is going to be really educational for people about these ideas of somatic healing and doing stuff with the nervous system. But I figured a great place to start is to hear a little bit about your story first.
Britt Piper: Absolutely. So I am a somatic experiencing practitioner now and somatic experiencing, it's a trauma resolution modality where we work to heal trauma through the body and more specifically through the nervous system. I'm an author, I've also been a sexual violence prevention and trauma educator for many years. I work a lot with the military, violent crimes, helping them to understand how trauma impacts the body and the brain and how it gets stored in memory and things like that. And there's the professional side of what I do, but I always say that my research really started off as me-search and a lot of people who work with trauma or who are kind of in this space, I feel like a lot of us have that own personal experience that drew us to this work.
And then once you learn about it, you're like, why does no one know this? You get really kind of sucked into the knowledge, the modalities and just how impactful and how wonderful and transformative it can be. So for me, I had experienced multiple traumas throughout my life earlier years. And it was more so in my late teens that I had kind of these, what we would consider to be acute traumas or shock traumas. So I lost my brother in a car accident in high school when I was 15. And then when I was 20, I was sexually assaulted by a stranger who helped me change my flat tire. And those were the two experiences in my life that really introduced me to therapy, conventional talk therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy.
I was diagnosed with different things, PTSD, depression, anxiety, I was on different medications. And therapy certainly helped. It brought relief to my life, but it didn't bring resolution. I would get into these cycles of I'd be fine for a while, and then I wouldn't be. And then I'd be fine for a while, and then I wouldn't be. And what that looked like was heavy drinking and substance abuse, severe eating disorders, suicidality. And it got so bad in kind of my late teens and early 20s that I actually ended up in a hospital with alcohol poisoning where I flatlined. When I was 18, and then when I was 22 shortly after my trial, my perpetrator was sentenced to 60 years. And shortly after that trial, I ended up in a jail cell because of an alcohol related incident. So recovery was not pretty for me.
I mean, it's not pretty for anyone. But what really started to move the needle forward is when it was suggested that I start to see a somatic therapist. And I was like, Soma, what? What is somatic? And Soma means body base. So I started working with a therapist to heal the imprints of trauma through the body. More specifically, I was told your nervous system is stuck in a state of survival. And it has been for a long time. You're armoured up and you don't need to be anymore. So that work was really profound for me. Within a year, I had been able to get to a place where I no longer had to be on medication. My life completely changed. My relationships changed. I no longer was, you know, found myself in these toxic environments and the abusive relationship that I had, you know, seemingly ended up in that came to an end. The eating disorders started to fade away. The alcohol abuse started to fade away.
And it was pretty remarkable because I felt like somatic therapy was really gentle. I know we'll probably talk a lot about like what it actually looks like. But in traditional therapy, I just remember having to sit with my therapist and talk ad nauseam about all these horrific experiences in my life. And in some ways, I felt like it caused more harm than good at times. You know, these sessions feeling so anxious and like, I need a drink after that, you know, and somatic therapy was different. It was really gentle. It wasn't overwhelming. And so, yeah, I just got really fascinated. I'm a bit of a nerd. And I was like, what is happening, you know, in these sessions? And I became obsessive.
But then I was like, wow, this really works. And there's real science behind it. And it's been here for a while. It's just now starting to become mainstream. I want to learn more about this. And then I want to help people, you know, in that space as well. So that was 13 years ago that I started seeing somatic therapists. And now that's what I do today in addition to some of the other hats that I still wear.
William Curb: Thank you for sharing the story. When I've talked about trauma related to me, I'm like, when I relate this to, I'm like, I don't want to draw sympathy. But I also, when I'm listening, I don't want to be put off and be like, oh, I don't want to. But yeah, I'm sorry to hear that happened. But it's great to hear about the healing journey too.
Britt Piper: Yeah, thank you.
William Curb: I definitely relate to having been to therapy and while I'm like, did that session help me at all? I feel worse than when I went in now. And sometimes that's what you need. You need to feel worse to get better. But it's also with trauma that's not always, I can see that being a very tricky issue. Like you don't want to then spiral further down with what's going on there.
Britt Piper: Spiral, yeah, we call it the trauma vortex. We don't want to be thrown deeper into the deep end, which is where trauma can seemingly leave us. So I always say, you know, and I know when we talk today, I just want to say this from the beginning, because I think it's important. I do think that traditional therapy is incredibly beneficial. And my book that came out a month ago, it's called Body First Healing. There's a reason why it says body first, not body only. And reason for that is because when we work to heal trauma, trauma can be defined as like any experience that overwhelms the nervous system's capacity to cope. And when that happens, your nervous system gets stuck in survival mode, more specifically what we call a stress response cycle. So you get stuck in a fight response, a flight response, shut down freeze, functional freeze fun.
And when you're stuck in that kind of chronic stress response, there are parts of the brain that aren't super easy to access or work with or guide, like your cognitive brain and cognitive behavioral therapy focuses all on thinking things out, right? Talking things out. And so I think that's why oftentimes people feel like they're hitting a wall with therapy because we're missing a big part of the puzzle. And that is the body approach. And only when we start to regulate the nervous system and kind of shut off or, you know, turn down that stress response or that alarm in the body, do we start to then have access back to our cognition, our prefrontal cortex. And so I think that most modalities out there are wonderful for the right person if used at the right time and in the right order. You know, I still work with a conventional talk therapist and I have a somatic therapist too. And they both provide incredible support in their own way.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. And I can also see like, well, especially with like CBT for trauma stuff there, because you have this like CBT, like, we're going to challenge these thoughts. Is this a real thought? I'm like, well, it did happen before. It was like, yeah, I can see not the always the best for trauma. I've definitely had that with things. I'm like, yeah, I know this isn't going to happen again, but it did happen. You were saying that somatic therapy has been around for a while, but it's not something I've heard a lot about, which I can see why it's become a passion to like kind of spread this information because I have heard some about it, but it's just always in bits and pieces and not something where I'm like, I've ever done a deep dive into it.
Britt Piper: So there's different modalities of somatic therapy. So the one that I specifically am trained in is called somatic experiencing. There's other forms such as, you know, somatic psychology, sensory motor system, somatics, and lots of others. But somatic experiencing in particular, I can speak to that was actually developed back in the 70s by Dr. Peter Levine. And he was a psychologist at the time, trauma researcher at UC Berkeley. And he kind of proposes really interesting question of, you know, animals in the wild are always faced with threat. They're in survival mode all the time. So why, unlike human animals, why, why do they not remain traumatized was the question like us human animals do.
And the reason he asks his question is because animals, human animals compared to wild animals, we have the same identical nervous systems, the same working systems. And the reason for that is because human animals, he studied through ethology, wild animals allow themselves to go through that stress response cycle. So when the nervous system and the body and the subconscious brain goes into survival mode, and what happens is there's adrenaline and cortisol that comes into the body, our stress hormones or our survival hormones, they're there to initiate or mobilize us to fight or flee. If those hormones are not discharged or expelled or released from the body, those stress hormones become chronic stress.
And over time, that chronic stress, again, we're stuck in the stress response cycle, that chronic stress starts to create mental emotional and physical health issues. And so it's like the nervous system is stuck in the past. And one of Peter's quotes is that it's like when a devastating moment becomes frozen in time, have this internal straight jacket where we're frozen in the past. And it's like the brain knows I'm safe, the trauma is over, but the nervous system hasn't gotten the memo yet.
And it's still stuck in the past trying to survive. And so he noticed that animals in the wild will do these natural primal mechanisms through the body, through the muscles, through their bodies to discharge or release those hormones. So I'm sure many, I'll say it now, and then I encourage everyone to go look up on Google, animals discharging in the wild. And you'll see that they allow themselves to like, they just like tremble and they shake. And sometimes you'll see like their mouths just kind of like, right, they're roaring.
And there's little things that they do to allow the body to let go of that adrenaline cortisol. But as human animals, we have what wild animals don't have, which is this thinking brain, this human brain, this neocortex, our conscious brain. And we are constantly judging our emotions, judging our feelings. No, I need to calm down when I'm anxious. So I just need to take some, I need to breathe right now and just make the shaking go away. Or when I'm angry and I feel heated, it's no, I'm not allowed to be angry or I'm not allowed to set a boundary or, oh, am I being too much?
Am I being dramatic? Right? So we are really good at suppressing and overriding and disrupting our very natural emotions and feelings. So anyways, all that to say, that was a lot of Peter's work. And it takes roughly, you could say roughly 20 years, they say, on average 17 years for practice to reach modern medicine, modern practice. And so somatic experiencing has been around since the late 70s, the early 80s. To this day, I think there's 60, 70,000 somatic experiencing practitioners all over the world and climbing. But it was really around the early 2000s that the somatic world started to become more prevalent. And then with the book, The Body Keeps the Score. Are you familiar with that book?
William Curb: I've heard a lot about it. I've heard some good, some bad.
Britt Piper: Yeah. So it's a really heavy book, as in it can be triggering for some. But there's a lot of great science to it. So Bessel van der Kolk is the author. It's now a New York Times bestseller. It came out in 2014, but it didn't become a bestseller until years later. This body psychology, you know, somatic psychology started to hit the mainstream. And so now it's just it seems that in the trauma space, especially therapists, they're now adding somatic practices into the work that they're already doing, which is really incredible to see.
William Curb: Yeah. And I can see definitely the idea of holding on to things in your body being like the mind-body connection. But I'm like, just one thing, holding that kind of stuff is going to have these downline effects that are fairly detrimental.
Britt Piper: Yeah, absolutely. And also too, you know, there's our formative years, you know, our first maybe our first three years are really important for nervous system development, but also our first six years are really important for nervous system development. And what I often find in my practice and working with clients over the years is that like me, people will come into the work because they recognize the symptoms. Hey, I'm using substances or hey, I have really bad anxiety or hey, I have digestive issues. Physical symptoms too to nervous system dysregulation when we're stuck in survival mode, digestive issues, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, TMJ, migraines, very, very common.
And so they'll come in with these symptoms and they'll say, and I think it's tied to this chronic stress in my life, my job or, oh, I experienced trauma like I did these acute traumas. And then when we get deeper into the work, they find, oh, there's some stuff from my earlier years that actually set the blueprint and the template for a nervous system that wasn't built to withstand these things that I'm experiencing. So for instance, there's a lot of studies done with PTSD and soldiers and they'll find that like who gets PTSD and it's usually the soldiers who had adverse childhood experiences compared to the soldiers who did not have adverse childhood experiences. And that's because again, if trauma is anything that overwhelms your nervous system, you have these individuals who grew up in an environment where maybe there was a lot of attachment, secure, good attachment with their caregivers.
They grew up in a regulated environment, in a safe environment, in an attuned environment. Therefore, their nervous system had this foundation, had this soil to really flourish and become resilient, which made them less vulnerable to trauma later on in life. And so in my case, when I was born, I didn't find out about this until I was a teenager, but when I was born, I was actually taken from my mother at birth and I was put into foster care for a few months because there was methamphetamine found in our system. My mom experienced a lot of trauma as well when she was pregnant with me. She was homeless, living out of a car. And so that impacted my nervous system quite a bit and my ability to move through difficult things later on in life.
So what I'm getting at here is that people often assume, again, it's these big traumas in their life that happen, not recognizing that those smaller moments, and I know that doesn't sound like a small moment, but those smaller moments of like, you know, I had a roof over my head and food on the table, but I was never told, I love you, or my parents were stressed all the time, or I felt like I was walking on eggshells, or my parents were helicopter parents, and they were anxious. Therefore, my nervous system felt anxious. There's so many things that contribute to our nervous system's ability to move through stress that we often find when we get into the work, it's like, oh, there's deeper stuff here. So out of the work starts back there.
William Curb: I've seen studies about like the Siege of Leningrad and all the children born during that time had problems with their nervous systems later because of the stress that their mothers were under when they were born.
Britt Piper: Yeah. And one thing I speak to in my book, Body First healing, is also intergenerational trauma. And I'm not sure if that's a concept you're familiar with, but essentially how trauma can get passed down from generation to generation, we call it transmission, but research shows that it can be passed on within at least three to five generations. And what it does is it can impact your stress hormones, your hormone levels, it can impact your DNA, it can impact your belief systems.
And one of the studies they did at Mount Sinai, they did the Holocaust studies, and they found that great grandchildren of Holocaust survivors had markedly higher stress hormones within their body and their physiology compared to descendants of non-Holocaust survivors. And so that's also part of the work when people get into it and they're like, I have these symptoms, but I haven't been through anything. And so that's a form of what we call indirect trauma. And there's incredible research on that. A book I would recommend is called It Didn't Start With You by Mark Wollin. It's incredible, amazing, and it's hands-on too. It gives you certain lineage trees that you can do and things like that.
William Curb: Yeah, because a lot of people are like, oh yeah, nothing happened to me, but I'm still struggling for whatever reason. Well, maybe it didn't happen to you, or maybe it's just something you're not... We all kind of think we have normal childhoods. Sometimes you tell a story and people are like, what?
Britt Piper: That's not normal. Yeah.
William Curb: And I think this is especially with ADHD, there's things about how often people get corrected. And as an ADHD child, you're going to be impulsive in acting out and doing things that you're going to have a lot of those corrections over and over and over again, while it isn't a singular source of trauma over time builds up who you are as a person being like, oh, I'm going to always be in trouble.
Britt Piper: Yeah, we call that chronic. So when we look at the categories of direct trauma, there's acute trauma, which I mentioned earlier, which is like that single event, that shock trauma. And but what often gets overlooked is chronic trauma. And chronic trauma is not an event, it's an experience that happens over time with no real beginning, middle and end. And it's very, it's not glaringly obvious. And that certainly would be one of those experiences.
William Curb: Yeah, it was funny when I was doing with my talk therapist and talking about things, mean like, oh, my priorities are based on me trying to not get in trouble. That's something to kind of explore more.
Britt Piper: Yeah. And then from a somatic lens, we would say, you know, so let's say that you and I were in a session together and you told me that. And I would say, is there a moment recently where you felt like you might be in trouble for something? And you might start walking me through a moment recently where I'm just making up a story, maybe like, oh, a couple of weeks ago, my boss sent me this email, he said, we need to talk. And there was nothing there. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm in trouble. And I would say, and as you're thinking about that right now, what do you notice in your body? And you might notice, oh, there's a heart beating. I might notice that I feel constriction up in my shoulders.
I might notice that my diaphragm is pulled up and it's hard to breathe. There's a lump in my throat. And what I would say is, okay, and can we track that for a moment and just see what happens next? And the next, it's like, okay. And then so a somatic session is very slow and there's not a lot of talking. And so we just kind of follow the body, we follow the nervous system. And then you might notice that there's like a, and you kind of lean forward. And I would say, what's happening now? And you're like, I just kind of like want to hide a little bit. And I would say, is that okay for that to be here?
You'd allow that to be here. And then maybe a moment later, you might sit back up and then look up or something, you might notice now there's tears. And now there's like natural discharge happening from the body. And so what we work with in the somatic space is body memory. Right? So there's like, there's explicit or verbal memory, which is what you work with in cognitive therapy. But in the body memory, Bessel Van Der Kolk says, trauma doesn't necessarily always come back as a memory. It comes back as a reaction. And it's the what we call procedural memory or kind of like muscle memory of how our nervous system or our body has learned to react or respond to things. Right?
So anytime I'm in trouble, my stomach drops, my shoulders close and I want to hide. And so we're stuck in that loop, right? That maybe it doesn't serve us. And so instead it's like, I might recommend after a moment, I might say, is it okay to just allow the spine to lift a little bit and see just what happens if we actually take up a little bit of space with our chest. And that's going to feel really foreign and really scary, but we're breaking muscle memory. Right? And so as you take on that new posture, it's like, oh, I think you take a breath. And I'm like, did you just notice the breath that you took? Somatic experiencing, we call it SE.
In SE work, we work with body memory to change our habitual reactions and muscle memory and responses, what we call our procedural patterns to create new behaviors. But the tagline is, is that we're allowing the body and the nervous system to do now what it couldn't do back then. Right? Maybe back then we learned like when I'm in trouble, that meant that I wasn't safe because maybe I would get punished in some way. And so then that's how I've learned to hide. But the nervous system is stuck there. So now it's like, how can we show the nervous system that we can have a different choice, allowing it to do now what it couldn't do back then?
William Curb: I think it's really helpful for people to hear like how that kind of works because I'm sure it's very confusing when you're like, okay, this is something in the body, but how do I, what does it actually look like?
Britt Piper: Right. Yeah. It's kind of shrouded in mystery. And I always tell people it's hard to know unless you've actually gone through a session what it looks like. So that's why I like to give just little examples of how that feels or what that experience is like.
William Curb: One of the things I'm thinking here too is, so like this is something where it's important to just work with the practitioner and something where you're like really trying to feel this experience while releasing the tension from your body rather than just, you can't just yoga your way out of it.
Britt Piper: Yeah. We unfortunately cannot yoga our way out of it. Yeah. It can be very beneficial and supportive to work with a practitioner in the book, Body First Healing. I do provide like, it's not an introductory roadmap. I would say it's a bit deeper than an introduction, but there of course are certain things in the book where I'm like, this is something you should probably do with a practitioner. But the thing I love about somatic experiencing and I think a lot of the somatic modality is out there in general. Somatic experiencing, the definition of it again is a naturalistic approach, a naturalistic approach to trauma resolution through the body, but that word naturalistic.
There was intention behind that word when Peter developed SE. And naturalistic is essentially pointing to the fact that we have these natural abilities built within our body, our biology. We are hardwired to self heal. We are a self correcting system. And so a lot of the work that we do is we're actually not taking people out of their bodies, trying to find fixes out here. We are posturing people to look inward to, oh, my body knows exactly what to do if I just allow it to do the thing. So in moments where it's like, I'm feeling some anxiety, how often are we like, oh, I'm feeling anxious, I need to make this go away.
And what happens is when we war against or resist the very natural experiences that our body is having, there's no such thing as a bad emotion. There is such thing as a really uncomfortable emotion. But when we war against it, we actually create more stress and resistance in the body. And we increase our stress response, which then you just create more of the anxiety or more of the thing. But it takes our body, when we get good at it, it can take our body only 90 seconds to move through a moment of what we call activation, that stress response cycle.
I was, I know I had to push back our call a little bit today because I was driving home from West Texas. There were some moments that were a little sketchy with some bad weather. And I was just tracking my nervous system. I was like, I am gripping the wheel, my pupils are dilated, my heart is racing out of my chest. But I know that this storm will pass. And our bodies are the same way. It's just that we're really good at like staying out of our body and staying up in our head.
William Curb: Yeah, I kind of see it as like our body trying to protect ourselves, but then falling into a maladaptive behavior where it's just like, hey, this worked in the past to protect us. Let's do it again and again.
Britt Piper: Exactly. It's like these strategies just need some updating. They're just old and outdated. Yeah, exactly.
William Curb: This is also something to like, so if we're like finding ourselves like with these chronic like, I'm always tight, it doesn't matter how much stretching I do. Is this like kind of a thing that people should kind of like, oh, I should look into, is this something where known or unknown, I have something that I need to work through?
Britt Piper: Yeah. So it could be, there could be a number of reasons for it. But the body is always, always showing us. It's always communicating to us. So first of all, there are certain points in the body where if there's tightness, if there's tension, if there's constriction, it usually means something and it's showing us a lot about our history. So for instance, if we have digestive issues, digestive issues can usually be tied back to moments of extreme fear, terror. If we have, if we feel tension on the right side of the body, which is where the liver is, this isn't always the case, but usually the liver is the organ of anger. Right. So it's like, oh, do I have some suppressed anger in my life?
If we feel lower back pain, that's usually where the adrenals are. Am I, have I been running from a saber tooth tiger my entire life? Right. Is there something my adrenals are shot? Right. That's usually because there's chronic stress or some kind of chronic trauma that we haven't faced. Migraines, right? Certain migraines can mean certain things. I would say that it's less about knowing why we're feeling the way that we are. And it's more so about just allowing that experience to be there and then providing support and tools to help the nervous system to kind of unbound. So when we're in a place of regulation, which is kind of like rest and digest the upgraded science from the polyvagal theory, it's called your ventral vagal state.
It's your state of safety and connection. So when we're in that rest and digest or ventral state, the body feels and the muscles and the cardiovascular system, the digestive system, urinary system, the endocrine system, everything is in homeostasis. We feel settled. We feel at ease. But as soon as we go into that activated stress response, everything changes. Everything changes. Our digestion, our hormones, all those things I just mentioned. And so over time, if we're stuck in chronic stress, we might not recognize that there are parts of our viscera or our organs or our muscles that are actually bracing and clenching. And over time, when we're not in ease, that means that we're in dis-ease, which then over time creates disease.
80% of women in particular, they're 80% more likely to experience autoimmune diseases and chronic illness and digestive issues. And we know that women, there's a lot of like self-silencing. Women hold down a lot of anger and anger is probably the most highly charged emotion. There's a lot of research that ties back to that. There is a study that came out that essentially found that women who silenced themselves in arguments with their spouses, right, they don't share their emotions freely, that they are four times more likely to die of early death by holding in these emotions. And so again, when we look at tension patterns in the body, it's usually emotions or something that we've been holding in or containing or suppressing or pushing down.
William Curb: Yeah, I can definitely see that. And having been in situations where I'm holding back emotions and then just like not having released it, like afterwards, I just feel terrible. Oh, I can.
Britt Piper: Yeah. And I just noticed that breath you just took. Yeah, it's like, I want to release it. And I will say too, it doesn't always have to be an emotion. Sometimes it can be a way that we feel or a boundary or something that we think or our opinion. Right. What we're really holding back or holding in is our voice and our authenticity. And again, we live in a time where people are really disconnected from their authenticity and what they really want. There's a lot of people pleasing in the world. There's a lot of foregoing and sacrificing our boundaries for hustle culture to get ahead. Burnout is on the rise and that's because we are pushing ourselves past our boundaries and we're not listening to our authentic boundaries of, yeah, that's actually outside of my capacity and I don't want to do that.
William Curb: Often we have this like, oh yeah, I can just keep going until I break down. I'm like, let's not do that. Like I don't want like the realization when someone says, do your best. It doesn't mean give everything you have plus 10%. It means just whatever you have right now, just do that.
Britt Piper: Yes, whatever your capacity is enough. And unfortunately, a lot of us don't know what our capacity is because again, we're so like, even when you think about your to-do lists and I still do this, I'm like, what's my to-do list for the week? And I think of all the stuff I need to get done. Again, I think of all the stuff that I get done. Need to get done, but I don't ever check in. But do we ever check in with our body and we're like, but how do I want to feel this week? And it's like we fill our calendars. There's no white space, but we're completely exhausted. And that definitely leads to nervous system disregulation.
William Curb: Yeah, I was using a planner on point and it had like just had a line at the end. Like, and what's one fun thing you're doing today? And like when I was like, I went for a week when I wasn't filling that line out and I'm like, oh, why am I doing this?
Britt Piper: Yeah, yeah, we're on autopilot. It's a state I talk about a lot in my book. It's called functional freeze. You know, so we have these states of the nervous system, what we call our primary states, right? There's primary colors, secondary colors, all the same. So these are our primary states. So it's fight, flight, rest and digest, which is ventral and then not freeze, but what we now call shut down or dorsal. And that's where like burnout, fatigue, depression really lives. And then we have blended states. Freeze is actually one of our blended states.
It's a mixed state. So it's a little bit of a flight response because there's so much charge, but there is shut down at the same time. So it's like one foot on the gas, one foot on the brakes, deer in the headlights, but we don't get stuck in freeze. We're not like stuck in that frozenness. It's more so shut down. But other blended states, another one is fawn, which I know people are very familiar with. That's a little bit of flight as well. So there's a lot of fear in our fawn response and then shut down. So we shut down our own wants, our own needs, our own boundaries and desires because we are afraid of rejection. We're afraid of conflict, confrontation.
And so we people, please, we pacify, we placate, we keep the peace, but we sacrifice our own peace. And then functional freeze is another blended state that is very, very prevalent today, especially in our super fast paced world. And that is a little bit of that shut down response, kind of where that freeze comes in, but also a flight response. So we're functioning. We are going through life. And what we say with the functional freeze state is that we're going through the motions, but without emotion. So we're armouring up. We are functioning. We're getting things done. But again, we're not in touch with our body. We're not in touch with our emotional landscape. And over time, that starts to wear on us.
William Curb: And I know with ADHD, a lot of us have a lot of trouble with having that intero-ception and knowing how we're feeling. And I can imagine that only just adds to things when you're like, because yeah, I'll be sitting in a chair in a funny position. And then like an hour later, I'm like, oh, this really hurts. I should have moved like 45 minutes ago.
Britt Piper: Sure. Yeah. So one of the tools we love using in somatic experiencing, essentially, when someone proposes the question, how do I feel a feeling? This is what we give them. So it's this concept called SIBAM. And SIBAM stands for sensation, image, behavior, affect, which means emotion and meaning. So often when we feel a feeling, people assume that we have to be like, well, what's the emotion? And feelings are so much more than just emotions. So you can start to track, like if you don't have an emotional language, it's like, I'm feeling something right now and I don't know what this is. Well, what's the sensation? I'm noticing there's constriction. I'm noticing I'm really hot. I'm noticing I'm sweating.
I'm noticing, again, my stomach is in knots or I feel kind of numb. Feeling numb is actually a feeling, by the way. Numb is a feeling. The next one is image. So maybe people don't have a language, you know, they're like, I can't really track what's going on in my body, intero-ception. I don't know what's emotionally going on. And so instead it's like, is there an image that comes to mind right now as you think about how you're feeling? And it's like, yeah, there's this, this, this weight, there's this big brick on my shoulders. Yeah. So things feel heavy. Yeah, things feel heavy right now. And then that might lead them to something else. Next is behavior.
So if we don't have any of the other, right, letters, maybe behavior is noticing. Are there any micro movements or impulses of the body? So SC practitioners are also essentially trained ethologists, but we study human animals. So we study like your body language, the way that your shoulders come down, the way that oh, their lower diaphragm just opened up. Or I'm noticing they're tilting or their eyes are doing this. They're little micro movements that you might be doing. Right now I'm noticing my feet are very crossed. They're like double crossed. Right. What's that about? Or it's like, I don't know how I'm feeling, but I'm noticing that I'm really fidgety right now and I'm like twirling my rings.
Oh, I wonder if I feel anxious. Right. So that can give you some idea. Affect is emotion. So is there an emotional language that's happening? And the last one is meaning, which a lot of us are really good at. So, well, I don't know how I'm feeling in my body. I don't know what the emotion is, but I know what the meaning is. And the meaning is I want to get the hell out of here. Right. So like, what's the story? So feelings don't always have to be emotions or sensations. Sometimes exploring the other elements of SIBAM can help us to make room to experience it more.
William Curb: Yeah, because too often I'm just like, I don't know how I feel. I don't know how did that make you feel? I don't know. It was not good.
Britt Piper: It really is though. It's a language that happens over time. You know, and when you work with a somatic experiencing practitioner, they will provide you. And I provide this in the book. We have a vocabulary list of 90 vocabulary terms for sensations like open, airy, shaky, buzzy, all these different things. And then there's also an emotion wheel, because this is really like a language that that we're learning and we're not we're not really good at it most of the time.
William Curb: Yeah, well, I mean, I'm thrilled that my kids have like this like emotional learning stuff that is in school now, but definitely not something that I ever grew up with.
Britt Piper: Right. Right. Yeah. I'm the same way I I saw when I went to Target last year, you know, how at Target, they have all the little front rows with all the little $5 things. There was a whole little section for you could tell it was for little kids and it was the calming corner stuff. And there was like a little emotion poster and like a little whiteboard thing and a calming corner sign. So I made a calming corner for my kids. And I was thinking back. I'm like, yeah, that wasn't anything I was given. You know, it's like, go to your room and go deal with it on your own.
William Curb: Yeah. You don't show you you can be fine as long as you're not showing negative emotions.
Britt Piper: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
William Curb: And don't get too excited either.
Britt Piper: Right. Exactly. Calm down. Yeah. Be quiet. Keep it down a little bit.
William Curb: One thing I just was also want to make sure we hit is I'm sure some people to see those were like, oh, I would love to find a therapist, a somatic therapist. How what we a good way for someone to like try and look into this because we know not all therapists are equal.
Britt Piper: So there are two places you could look. If you're looking for a specific somatic therapist that's trained in somatic experiencing, then you can go to traumahealing.org. And there is going to be a practitioner or directory that's global. So you can look by the region that you're in, state you're in, town that you're in. You can look by specialties. So like, what are they also trained in, whether it's attachment, relationships, grief, substance abuse, you know, things like that.
You can also look for whether or not they're in person or virtual. So if you're looking for a specific SCP, go to traumahealing.org. And that's our somatic experiencing international.
That's our website. If you're looking for someone who's just trained in somatics, but not the full somatic experiencing modality, then you can go to theembodylab.com. And they also have a practitioner directory. And these are more so therapists and practitioners who've added just certifications to the work that they do. These are usually like six months certifications to become an SCP. It's a three year process.
It's like going back to school. So it's pretty intense, but there are wonderful practitioners and therapists who aren't all the way trained in SE, but they do have a lot of the great working foundational knowledge of somatic work. So the Embody Lab also has a very similar directory that's international. And then if you want to work with me, you can go to bodyfirsthealing.com. Body first healing, the book that I wrote is based on my body first healing program, which I created back in 2017. It's a six month group healing program and people can join it at any time. So it's a live program, but it's also an online program as well.
William Curb: So I was wondering if there's just any final thoughts you want to leave the audience with.
Britt Piper: You know, I think one of the things that I found personally helped me most in this work is when you start to get into the science and the understanding of your body, your biology, your nervous system, you recognize that you were never broken and that your symptoms make sense and that there's nothing wrong with you and that you don't need to be fixed and that your body and brain were brilliantly built to help you survive in the worst of conditions.
But that again, it's a self correcting system and that you can self heal and turn inward. It's just about kind of reclaiming or rediscovering what those tools are. So yeah, I think that was probably the biggest thing for me is recognizing, oh, I'm not broken. There's nothing wrong with me. And that's what I hear from so many of the clients that I've worked with over the years is just this permission and kind of the self compassion of that awareness so.
William Curb: Awesome. If people want to hear more about your stuff, where should they go?
Britt Piper: Connect with me directly on Instagram @healwithbritt or TikTok at healwithbritt, Brit with two T's. And if you want to learn more about the book, my program or the work that I do or working with me, you can go to bodyfirsthealing.com.
William Curb: Awesome. I'll get all that in the show notes and so people can find you pretty easily. So thank you so much for coming on the show. This is an incredible conversation. I think people are getting a lot out of it.
Britt Piper: Thank you so much. This was great.
This Episode's Top Tips
1. Somatic practices are body-based approaches to healing that focus on how trauma and stress are held in the nervous system rather than just the mind. They employ gentle techniques, such as tracking body sensations, subtle movements, and breath, to help the body complete its stress response cycles.
2. SI-BAM is a tool from Somatic Experiencing that helps track your internal state when emotions feel vague or difficult to name. It stands for Sensation, Image, Behavior, Affect (emotion), and Meaning. It begins by noticing physical sensations (such as tightness, warmth, or buzzing), and then observing if any mental images arise. It is followed by observing your body’s behavior or impulses (fidgeting, leaning forward) and from there checking for any identifiable emotions, and noticing what meaning or story you attach to the experience.
3. If you feel stuck in the same emotional patterns and if stress, anxiety, or trauma seem to “live” in your body, showing up as chronic tension, pain, or fatigue, somatic therapy could be an option for you. Somatic work can give you tools to gently release that “stuck” survival energy and restore a sense of calm.
4. When dealing with trauma, you don’t have to go it alone, but it is also important to work with a practitioner who understands what they are doing. And understand that somatic therapy is just one of many options that you can use to help you get the help you need.