Overcoming Trauma through Somatic Body Healing with Britt Piper [Episode 1008]

This Week’s Episode Special Guest: Estelle Bingham

Summary:

In this conversation, Kimberly and Brittany Piper delve into the profound impact of trauma on the nervous system and the importance of somatic healing. Brittany shares insights from her new book, ‘Body First Healing,’ discussing how trauma is stored in the body and how somatic work can help individuals reconnect with their bodies to facilitate healing. They explore the concept of intergenerational trauma, the natural responses to trauma observed in animals, and the significance of body awareness in the healing process. Brittany also shares her personal journey of overcoming trauma and the tools that can aid in navigating trauma responses, emphasizing the importance of building resilience and capacity for emotions. The conversation concludes with a message of empowerment, encouraging individuals to trust their bodies and recognize their innate ability to heal.

About Britt Piper

Brittany Piper is a renowned speaker, author, and Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner specializing in sexual violence prevention and trauma-informed care. As a survivor and leading advocate, she has educated thousands worldwide, including the U.S. Army and Department of Justice. Her book, Body-First Healing: A Revolutionary Guide to Nervous System Recovery, offers a groundbreaking approach to nervous system regulation and recovery through harnessing the wisdom of the body.

Guest Resources:

Website: https://www.bodyfirsthealing.com/about

Book: Body-First Healing: A Revolutionary Guide to Nervous System Recovery

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Episode Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Somatic Healing and Trauma
02:59 Understanding Trauma and the Nervous System
06:07 The Role of Body Memory in Healing
08:56 Intergenerational Trauma and Its Impact
11:57 Lessons from Animal Behavior on Trauma Recovery
14:50 Cultural Disconnection from Somatic Practices
17:52 Personal Stories of Healing and Resilience
21:05 Justice and Advocacy for Survivors of Trauma
24:31 The Journey Through Trauma and Justice
28:49 Understanding the Body’s Response to Trauma
33:51 Navigating Anger and Emotional Regulation
39:32 Empowerment Through Somatic Healing
46:41 The Path to Self-Healing

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Transcript:

Kimberly Snyder (00:00.718)
Hi everyone and welcome back to our Monday interview show. I am so excited for our very special guest today and our conversation with Brittany Piper, who is a speaker and somatic and trauma trained practitioner specializing in somatic experiencing. She has a brand new book out called Body First Healing, Get Unstuck and Recover from Trauma with Somatic Healing.

Brittany and I were speaking just a little bit before the podcast about how amazing it is to talk about trauma and healing on such a deep level now, which wasn’t really happening a generation earlier. So Brittany, thank you so much. Welcome to our show and congratulations on your new book all at the same time.

Brittany Piper (00:43.95)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited to have a conversation today. So I appreciate you having me here.

Kimberly Snyder (00:51.118)
You know, it’s very close to my heart, literally. My recent book was about the heart and dropping into this deeper place beyond the linear mind. And I found that really reflected in your book as well, this idea that things happen to us, challenging experiences happen of all different degrees, and we can’t just think our way out of it. Can you talk a little bit about how experiences can actually get stored?

in our nervous system and in our body, similarly to how we might not properly digest certain foods.

Brittany Piper (01:26.124)
Yeah. Yeah, the, so I think that there’ve been so many different definitions surrounding trauma over the years. And I think that the one that lands best with me is that trauma is any experience that overwhelms the nervous system’s capacity to cope. And when that happens, your nervous system can get stuck in chronic states of survival. Or in other words, it gets stuck.

Kimberly Snyder (01:42.381)
Mm.

Kimberly Snyder (01:50.062)
Okay.

Brittany Piper (01:54.016)
in the states or the responses that it used in the past. And it’s as if somatic work, which is body-based healing work, we work with the nervous system and with the body, and more specifically body memory rather than verbal memory to help the body and the nervous system to know that the trauma is over, essentially catching up with what the mind already knows. Like the mind knows that the trauma was, you know, maybe seemingly back then, but maybe the nervous system doesn’t know that.

Kimberly Snyder (02:14.473)
Right.

Brittany Piper (02:23.714)
and it’s not a rational system. Yeah, it’s a system that operates through experience, through this felt sense. And so what we really try to do is help people in their nervous system to kind of disarm and to recognize you don’t have to be stuck in survival mode anymore. So, yeah.

Kimberly Snyder (02:25.516)
Yes.

Kimberly Snyder (02:43.904)
Survival mode is that feeling of almost, when you say that word, it conjures up frantic, irrational, big emotions, freezing, like all sorts of ways that can manifest and not feeling safe.

Brittany Piper (02:59.01)
Yes, yeah. Yeah, it’s kind of the best way I describe it is like an analogy I like to use is like, we’re armored up, but you can think of like this night suit of armor. It’s like we’re battled up to go or we’re armored up to go into battle. But at some point it’s like our nervous system didn’t get the memo that the battle is over. And so we kind of remain with like this armor on and this armor can start to, know, what once started off as self protective in nature.

Kimberly Snyder (03:06.582)
Yes.

Brittany Piper (03:25.486)
it can start to show up in almost the self-destructive or self-sabotaging ways, which I think is such a more compassionate way to look at it as this is self-protection, not self-sabotage. And we can kind of like lose sight of ourselves. We can disconnect from ourselves because we get so lost in this armor. Yeah, and I’m sure you experienced the same. A lot of the people that I work with, they come to me and they’re like, I just feel stuck.

Kimberly Snyder (03:43.854)
Right.

Brittany Piper (03:52.168)
And I feel like I’m not myself and I don’t know how to get out of this. And that stuckness is really what it boils down to is a nervous system that is stuck in those active defenses still.

Kimberly Snyder (04:03.99)
And has it been your experience that no matter what we’ve been through, we can reteach the nervous system through some of the tools that are in your book, which we’ll talk about in a moment and through this more body-based experience, because I’ve met people, and I’m sure you talk about in the book, that have been in therapy, because we’ve been talking, go to therapy, but they’ve been talking about the same story.

for years and years. I’ve met people that seem to have the same narrative, victimhood, I wasn’t treated like this, and they almost still sound angry. So it’s like, are we really clearing it out by continuing to reinforce and talk about it?

Brittany Piper (04:35.0)
Yeah.

Brittany Piper (04:39.992)
Mm-hmm.

Brittany Piper (04:46.54)
Yeah, exactly. So I think what I can maybe like describe a little bit is what we call the stress or the threat response cycle. And so when your nervous system goes into an active state of survival, know, fight, flight, shut down, freeze, fawn or functional freeze, what happens is first, your body is kind of inundated or flooded with survival hormones, stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol.

Kimberly Snyder (04:54.231)
Yes, please.

Kimberly Snyder (05:13.644)
Yes.

Brittany Piper (05:13.74)
and this helps to mobilize you to fight or flee. And so when you have an experience though that overwhelms that stress response, you can kind of think of it like a pressure cooker. All of that adrenaline and cortisol is still stuck within the body and the physiology. And so there’s no amount of talking that out of your body. You have to be able to move through that experience and express or what we call discharge all of that adrenaline and cortisol. So.

You you see this, I’ll use an example of maybe abuse or, you know, something that was violent in nature where you weren’t able to fight back. You might find that you now have what we call a thwarted fight response. And so you have likely a lot of suppressed anger that’s being held down within the body and the system. And so the work actually starts with not throwing someone into the deep end of their trauma.

Kimberly Snyder (05:50.765)
Right.

Brittany Piper (06:07.276)
like we commonly do in therapy, right? That’s what we’re used to. I just wanna talk about it. I wanna get into it. Instead, we actually walk them into like the shallow end and we’re like, hey, what would it be like to think about a moment recently where you felt a little frustrated, a little angry by something and maybe it’s, yeah, someone cut me off the other day and it kind of like pissed me off. And you’re like, okay, and as you’re thinking about that, what do you notice in your body? Wow, there’s some heat here and I’m actually noticing my jaw is clenching. And so,

we touch into more gentle moments of activation, which allows that, again, that pressure cooker, we just gently open the lid for a second and close it back down. And it lets out and discharges some of that adrenaline and cortisol, getting these chronic stress hormones out of the body. And we do that consistently over time. But what’s also great about that is that you’re showing the nervous system or you’re giving it evidence that, hey, you can be with an experience of anger.

Kimberly Snyder (06:54.627)
Mm.

Brittany Piper (07:05.358)
maybe like you weren’t able to do in the past and you can be okay. And so it’s this evidence that over time is like, yeah, when I do feel anger in my body, like this frustration of, don’t like the way that person talked to me. Instead of shutting it down like it automatically do, or instead of running away or avoiding conflict, my body now has this muscle memory of like, I can be with that anger and I can express it. so trauma work doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to go back into all the hard stuff.

Kimberly Snyder (07:28.078)
Well.

Brittany Piper (07:35.692)
Right? We’re working with the body memory here in the present and untethering that, like, from the past. If that makes sense,

Kimberly Snyder (07:42.851)
Mm.

And it’s, imagine it’s different for each person. noticed in, you know, the heart work awakening, the heart or heart coherence, it’s not linear. Like, you had this much trauma, so it’s going to take this prescribed amount of time to reteach. It could be big awakenings or big realizations. Certain junctures are maybe a little bit more time to work through. that? Yeah.

Brittany Piper (07:48.611)
Yes.

Brittany Piper (08:01.998)
Mm-hmm.

Brittany Piper (08:05.804)
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, because every year you’re working with each individual person, their nervous system, but also the nervous systems that came before them. So like a lot of the work that we do is we work with a lot of, you know, it’s important to know like intergenerationally, what was your life like in your earliest years, because our first three years of life really lay the foundation for our nervous system.

Kimberly Snyder (08:23.286)
Yes.

Brittany Piper (08:30.306)
And so that surprises people when they get into somatic work. They’re like, well, I can’t even remember that. And it’s like, your body remembers. And yeah. And then even before that, even when you’re, exactly. Yeah. And even, you know, what were the experiences of your mother and your grandmother? So, and that’s something I, you know, deeply explored in my book with my experience was that journey of intergenerational trauma, you know, cause I’m not.

Kimberly Snyder (08:32.535)
Thank

Kimberly Snyder (08:36.724)
so much or even when you were pregnant or when your mother was pregnant with you.

Brittany Piper (08:56.578)
I’m not sure if people probably come to you with this of like, think I have the signs and symptoms of trauma, but like, I don’t think I’ve experienced anything. And so we explore indirect trauma, which is like, yeah, but I think there’s also like, you know, getting to the, well, trauma might not be what you think it is. I think we have these ideas of, yeah.

Kimberly Snyder (09:05.058)
Kimberly Snyder (09:15.982)
Well, when I read the body keeps the score, it blew me away that statistic, which really stayed in my head from Bessel van der Kolk, that was 75 % of Americans experience some form of trauma. Because I think some of us hear that word and we think about accidents or a one-time incident. one of the things that, because I wouldn’t have used that word in the past, Brittany, but for me, it was learning,

not being seen and heard, like different levels of neglect is actually a really big form of trauma throughout childhood, which is something that I did go through. well-intentioned parents that were busy, were hustling, they were working, but there was a lot of coping mechanisms and perfectionism and eating disorders and just constant achieving to sort of fill that unworthiness feeling. So.

Brittany Piper (10:02.99)
Yeah.

Brittany Piper (10:09.027)
Yeah.

Kimberly Snyder (10:09.688)
Thank you for bringing up that it is actually much more than we realize. And I love how you delve into Peter Levine’s work. We could touch on that for a moment where he researched animals to see that, you know, they don’t have trauma the same way we do and they’re like naturally shaking and trembling after something happens. Can you share a little bit about, you know, that work and how we can, what we can learn from it as humans?

Brittany Piper (10:33.888)
Yeah. Yeah. So I first want to touch on what you just mentioned is, you know, in hearing about your experience, it reminds me a little bit. So in the somatic experiencing world, we use the definition of trauma is that it’s anything that feels like too much, too fast, too soon, or not enough. And so like when you talk about neglect or things like that, those are things that often get overlooked.

Kimberly Snyder (10:54.156)
Mmm.

Kimberly Snyder (11:00.993)
Yeah.

Brittany Piper (11:01.026)
You there are such experiences that are overlooked in our culture today. And I think because they kind of fly below the radar, they sometimes can fester, you know, in our lives in much more intense ways. And so, yeah, just thank you for mentioning that. Yeah, Peter’s work was profound for me to the point where I became a somatic experiencing practitioner. So, SE is what I’m professionally trained in, but…

Kimberly Snyder (11:10.647)
Yes.

Brittany Piper (11:28.31)
Yeah, his book, Waking the Tiger, he explored how animals in the wild, they experience threat all the time. They go into these survival responses, yet they don’t remain, and I’m using air quotes, traumatized in the way that humans do. And humans, mean, we have the same primal systems, subcortical systems that animals in the wild do. In other words, our nervous systems are nearly identical to nervous systems of animals in the wild.

And what he found is that animals in the wild don’t have this wonderful conscious human brain, right? And so they’re often not talking themselves out of their feelings. So animals, when they experience activation and they go into fight or flight and they have that adrenaline and cortisol, they will naturally discharge all of these, know, press hormones. And I remember in my SE training, they’re like, okay, we’re gonna watch some animal videos today. And I’m like, we’re all looking at each other like we’re watching animal videos.

Kimberly Snyder (12:18.06)
Wait.

Brittany Piper (12:27.202)
But it was fascinating to see how a gazelle would run from a cheetah, would get away, but it would go into a shutdown or a freeze response and it would faint. And then we watched this video as it would kind of seemingly come back to life and it would lay there and it would do this labored breathing and then it would start trembling and shaking. And then you see the mouth kind of salivating. And then the next thing you know, it’s standing up, shaking its body and it’s running off.

Kimberly Snyder (12:55.402)
All innately, it’s just in their knowing, their intuitive knowing.

Brittany Piper (12:58.56)
Exactly. Yes, exactly. And we have those same mechanisms and those same responses. So like, you know, as a professional speaker, I had debilitating stage fright. And for years I was like, I need to go to Toastmasters to figure out how to get over my fear. I need to do like exposure therapy. Like I got to figure this out because I would freeze on stage. Like I’d get dry mouth. I wouldn’t be able to talk.

And when I learned that it was less about like calming down and like making the shakes go away, and it was more so like, how can I actually allow some of that to be here and move it through my body? Like our body naturally knows how to metabolize the charge of emotions. If we just stopped getting in our way and overriding what the body knows how to do, or…

And I don’t want to say that we always consciously do that. Sometimes it’s done to us and we remain kind of stuck, dissociated, and our body doesn’t know how to contain or move through those emotions. But yeah, the study of animals in the wild is a really big part of the SE framework.

Kimberly Snyder (14:10.126)
You know, I think about these ancient cultures where there was a lot of tribal dancing and gathering around fires. And I wonder if that was embedded in these earlier cultures. We’ve unfortunately moved away from a lot of that innate knowing. when I was backpacking in Africa, I saw almost, I think it was a funeral gathering and it was, the dancing was like so, intense and it was just beautiful, but dramatic. And it was.

Brittany Piper (14:23.084)
Yeah, absolutely.

Brittany Piper (14:29.613)
Hmm.

Kimberly Snyder (14:40.11)
Like they were moving the grief through their body. I had never seen anything like that in any sort of funeral. And it was amazing. It was somatic as you were describing.

Brittany Piper (14:50.51)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, even as you’re talking about that, I’m getting goosebumps now because that’s, I feel like in this world that we live in, in kind of a modernized culture, we’ve become so disconnected and associated and detached from our bodies. You know, this fast-paced world that we live in, we’re very mind heavy, which is fine. However, our body in many ways, a lot of the upgraded science shows that our body is really in the driver’s seat.

the vagus nerve, which is like the longest nerve in the body. It’s known as the information superhighway. But in the early 2000s, we found that this bidirectional informational nerve, 80 % of those messages go from the body up to the brain and only 20 % go from the brain down to the body. And so, yeah, the body holds so much ancient.

Kimberly Snyder (15:40.279)
Yes.

Brittany Piper (15:45.934)
primal wisdom and I feel like we oftentimes we’re scared of our bodies. We don’t know how to connect with our bodies and that’s why like in my book, but also if you were to work with any somatic experiencing practitioner, they give you a vocabulary of sensations to like learn the language of the body and I feel like this is something that I do believe is innately built within us, but it’s become so we’re so disconnected from it that it feels so foreign.

Kimberly Snyder (16:00.728)
Mmm.

Brittany Piper (16:14.351)
We kind of forget that we have bodies sometimes and then we…

Kimberly Snyder (16:18.11)
Yeah, it becomes very heady. It’s the same thing with the heart work. know, so surprised to learn the heart is another brain with 40,000 neurons and it too is sending more messages up because we do get so rational and linear. You know, how we started the conversation trying to think our way rationally, well, I’m not in danger anymore or this is safe, but it’s still in there until we feel. And I want to get into some of those tools you share, but first I just want to acknowledge Britt how vulnerable and

Brittany Piper (16:28.91)
Mm-hmm.

Brittany Piper (16:37.421)
Mm-hmm.

Kimberly Snyder (16:47.49)
beautiful it was that you shared parts of your story as not someone just teaching about this, but someone that’s gone through profound healing and embodies what it can be like to live in far more peace in your body. And you mentioned about your brother’s car accident and also your, you know, the sexual assault, which, know, is, you know, as a woman, could say it’s like the, you know, one of the worst things that we could imagine happening to our sense of safety.

Brittany Piper (17:17.016)
Mm-hmm.

Kimberly Snyder (17:17.462)
And to have gone through that and teach about it now is amazing.

Brittany Piper (17:22.263)
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I always say a lot of my work started off as me search. You know, I would say probably most of us in this space, right, where a lot of our work is informed by our own personal experiences. And, you know, I had been in and out of conventional therapy for a lot of my life and on different medications. And it was supportive, but I felt like it would bring temporary relief, but I never found like resolution. And I would get in these cycles of like,

Kimberly Snyder (17:27.66)
Sure.

Brittany Piper (17:52.44)
Britney’s drinking again or, Britney’s in jail now or, Britney’s in the hospital. And I just felt like every couple of years I was in this cycle of self-destruction, like just destroying myself from within. And I had an experience, which I share about in the book, when I ended up in a jail cell. And it was in that jail cell over three days that my body was able, I feel like, to process decades old grief and trauma.

that I had become such an expert at running from. And I also came from a family where we just put everything under the rug. You just muscle through, you armor through, right? And in my early 20s, I realized that avoiding isn’t the same thing as healing and that eventually you have to do the work. So yeah, coming out of that jail cell, I felt like a literal different person.

And I remember the judge, this was shortly after my sexual assault case, she remembered who I was. And she said, we’re gonna drop the charges, but she said, you need to learn to live with your pain better. And that was kind of like a big moment because she didn’t say, get over it, get past it. She said, learn to with, yes, with it. Which was a totally new concept, right? Like that’s not what I, you you muscle through, you move on, you get past it. And that was also a message that was passed down.

Kimberly Snyder (19:03.775)
with

Brittany Piper (19:15.95)
through generations in my family, in my lineage. And when I looked at the history of the women in my family, we’re all very much the same, right? We just, keep it pushing, we keep going, we stay busy, we focus on work, we overachieve, we’re perfectionist, kind of like you said. But the masking could only last for so long. And so I got into somatic healing back in 2012, just on my personal.

in my own personal journey, because I was like, what happened to me in that jail cell? My body felt different. Something happened. And as I started to learn about the literature and also started experiencing it myself as a client, I was like, how does the world not know about this? And so that’s kind of what started that process for me of just trying to share with anyone that I could, because I was like, this needs to be more widely known.

Kimberly Snyder (20:08.589)
Yes.

Kimberly Snyder (20:12.428)
Before we move on from your story, Britt, I also want to acknowledge, and what an amazing judge to have been put in your path. It was like a messenger, right, from the divine to say that. But I also want to acknowledge in our society when these sorts of things happen, how easy it is to pretend, like you said, like to not take someone to trial for rape. I have a friend who was raped in college and her parents were like, no, this is going to be too big a deal, just get over it. And so she never pressed charges.

And now, you know, a couple of decades later, I don’t know if she ever fully healed. She has never had any other long-term relationships. And so the bravery it must have took to go on trial for two years. And there was a short trauma from that, but maybe a healing that you actually saw it all the way through.

Brittany Piper (21:05.26)
Yeah. Yeah, there was. I think justice looks so different for every survivor. My work in the trauma space started. I was working in sexual violence and rape crisis centers here in the States, but mainly abroad. And justice shows up in so many ways. unfortunately, we live in a time where favor is not in the hands of the victim. It’s often most times in the hands of the perpetrator.

It’s a systemic issue and one that I still fight to end. Like every day this past week, I was in Pennsylvania. I had three programs talking to college students through different universities in Pennsylvania. And I always ask this question at the beginning of every program, like, will you please quietly stand if you know someone who’s experienced sexual violence? And usually it’s like, I’m just tearing up talking about it. Usually it’s like, I don’t know, 50 to 75 % of the audience will stand, which is like gut wrenching.

The second question is then, for those of you standing, will you please stay standing if you know that that person reported it? Half of them sit down. And then the people that are still standing all then ask, if you know that the perpetrator received justice, please stay standing. If they did not, can you quietly sit down? And usually it’s a handful. And I’ll talk to audience of like hundreds, thousands, handful of people. An event I had this past week, there were probably about 250 people standing.

Kimberly Snyder (22:10.03)
Mm.

Brittany Piper (22:33.1)
at the first question, I don’t know, maybe 75 standing, one person was standing at the very end. And so there are so many survivors who don’t have the story or the experience that I do where they were able to receive justice in that way through the criminal system. And there are other ways that you can receive justice, whether it’s sharing your story.

Kimberly Snyder (22:41.09)
Yes.

Brittany Piper (23:00.034)
you know, civil things that you can do, whether it’s advocating and volunteering, whether it’s talking to your children, and, you know, helping them to be better people so that they don’t end up being perpetrators in the world. Yeah, there’s a lot of other things that you can explore. But unfortunately, that’s the story. You know, the story of your friend is a story I’ve heard so many times over the years doing this is just, yeah, it’s really heartbreaking.

Kimberly Snyder (23:13.774)
Sure.

Kimberly Snyder (23:22.428)
Kimberly Snyder (23:27.756)
I mean, Brittany, it must’ve been a time so hard to continue with that type of trial. And was your family supportive of you?

Brittany Piper (23:36.908)
They were, yeah. Yeah, they were supportive. My friends were supportive. What you often see in cases like mine is where there’s clear, which for me it’s like, it all should be black and white, but when there’s clear black and white evidence that this person was assaulted. So I was assaulted by a stranger who helped me change my flat tire, which is not commonly the case. 90 % of assaults happen by someone that the victim actually knows, whether it’s a friend.

someone that they’re in a relationship with, someone that they’re dating. So in my case, it was rare. And it was pretty black and white that this person had done this. And because they didn’t have a case, the defense’s strategy was, we’re just going to continue or postpone the trial as many times as we can. And it’s a way to emotionally beat down the victim until they

Kimberly Snyder (24:24.843)
Ugh.

Brittany Piper (24:31.928)
drop the charges. And by the way, the reason I say victim and not survivor, I feel like I should say this. I work a lot in the sexual violence space. I work a lot with violent crimes units, the military and Department of Justice. do trainings and just, we often use victim offender language, but we can also say survivor here as well. So, but in my case, my case was postponed or the trial was postponed nine times over a two year period, which meant that nine times I had to like kind of go through dress rehearsal.

You meet with your legal team, you practice being on the witness stand, you go through the depositions, you have to listen to your tape statements back. I mean, it was like exposure-based therapy to the extreme. was really, really hard. But I don’t know. I was determined. But also, I was really dissociated. And what people didn’t know is that behind the scenes, was probably at, during that two-year period, I was at the worst point in my life. I remember after the sentencing,

Kimberly Snyder (25:15.16)
I’m done.

Brittany Piper (25:30.562)
We finally went to trial. He was sentenced to 60 years. And the news anchors, when they were sharing about it on the news the night following, I remember them saying, 20 years of covering court trials and we’ve never seen a rape victim who is this poised, this composed, I use the air quotes again, composed, who was able to look her rapist in the eye and say, you did this and you’re gonna pay.

But I always say that whether or not I was stoic and emotionless on the stand or whether or not I was full of emotions, that word strong is so relative. And it’s really that I was so distraught that I was not inside my body. I was just dissociated. So at that time is when I was really struggling with alcohol abuse and pill dependence and.

Kimberly Snyder (26:18.072)
Thank

Brittany Piper (26:25.6)
eating disorders, suicidal ideation, and then not even 30 days after that sentencing, that’s when I ended up in a jail cell because I was out one night with a boyfriend who was drinking and driving. And I always say that I think is the perfect indication of like where I was at at the time in my life. He was pulled over, arrested, and when the police officers just went to physically pull me out of the car,

I had a flashback of the night of my experience, my assault, of a man touching me in a car. Yeah. And my nervous system essentially went back into a trauma reenactment and I tried to fight back. And that’s how I ended up in that jail cell. And thank goodness for the judge, you know, who offered me a second chance, another chance, but yeah. Yeah.

Kimberly Snyder (26:53.826)
I don’t know.

Kimberly Snyder (27:12.462)
like an angel, like she could see you, she could see the light in you and that you were going through this, you know, just overwhelmed.

Brittany Piper (27:22.06)
Yeah, she was a judge who did not judge. Yeah.

Kimberly Snyder (27:26.517)
Amazing. And Brittany, it’s also amazing, I have to say that since this person was a stranger that you were able to find this man and go all the way through. I I hone in on the story so much because as a woman, especially it’s just like, yes, justice, like when we hear the stories because they are rare, like we want so much for that to always be the case. And it’s heartbreaking that it isn’t.

Brittany Piper (27:48.142)
Mm-hmm.

Kimberly Snyder (27:52.194)
But back to your book, because thank you for, you know, all the times it isn’t and all the daily, we, all of us have so much stories and experiences and we’re here to grow and evolve and come back to the heart and the true self. And along the way to have these tools to keep getting back to who we are, which is not the trauma response. It’s not survival mode. Being in this easeful, loving, you know, just more like present, I adapt with life. Whoa.

Brittany Piper (27:54.648)
Thank

Brittany Piper (27:58.54)
Yeah.

Brittany Piper (28:11.906)
back to who we are. Amen to that. Yes, I love that.

Brittany Piper (28:21.004)
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Kimberly Snyder (28:24.022)
So tell us, you know, back to the book, which is, you know, so wonderfully organized. talks, we talk about, you know, how trauma lives in the body, and then we get into more of an actual roadmap. So if this is new for people and they’re saying, well, I’ve always been in talk therapy or, know, I don’t have a good feeling. I just talk it out with my husband or my friend. Let’s just say we start to notice, hmm, I’m feeling…

really tense, this person said something to me, my heart’s racing, like, now I recognize I’m actually in some type of trauma response, my voice sounds different. What are some of the things that we can do to actually soothe ourselves? I mean, this is a really broad question, but just like very beginning, like, so we can start to even just see a little bit of a picture of your work.

Brittany Piper (29:03.874)
Yeah.

Brittany Piper (29:11.5)
Yeah, so I think that one of the things I want to say from the very beginning is that the nervous system in the body knows exactly what to do if we allow it to do it. And we often have this perception that nervous system regulation or being emotionally resilient means that we are calm, cool, and collected all the time. And

In the nervous system space, we use this wonderful visualization of a ladder to illustrate what the nervous system looks like. So it’s called the polyvagal ladder. It’s from the polyvagal theory, which is another modality that I’m trained in, but you can think of it as it’s a ladder with three sections. So at the top of the ladder, your nervous system ladder is like your rest and digest state, what we call ventral vagal. In the middle of the ladder is your fight or flight state, your sympathetic state. And at the bottom is your shutdown state.

called dorsal. It’s kind of like your free state. And people would assume a regulated nervous system means that you stay up at the top of that ladder all day long, or you aim to be there all the time. But a regulated nervous system is actually what we call a flexible nervous system. It’s one that goes up and down that ladder flexibly with fluidity without getting stuck.

And then I would say a more regulated nervous system actually goes up and down that ladder roughly 100 times a day. like we, yeah, so like we go in and out of these experiences of fight, flight, shut down, fawn, and fawn is like a blended state. But all that to say in moments where, I’m noticing my voice has changed or I’m noticing I’m feeling this bracing, it’s less about how do I regulate and how do I fix this?

Kimberly Snyder (30:39.191)
Wow.

Brittany Piper (31:01.068)
Because when we do that, what it actually does is it takes us out of our body and it sends the message that this anxiety isn’t allowed to be here. This constriction isn’t allowed to be here. And so one of the key pieces is that it’s learning about how to relate to our body in a way that’s more curious, in a way that’s more compassionate, that has more clarity, rather than like, how do I fix it? Because somatics means of the body.

And so in somatic experiencing, we help people to better be in their body rather than rushing to like get stuff out or, you know, get out of the experience. So in those moments where someone might be having a conversation and they feel kind of this tightness or bracing, it’s like, can I recognize that this is here? And then I use what I call the three E’s in my book to really like guide people is the first E is experience, express, expel.

So can I first just notice what’s my body experiencing right now? Like I’m noticing my vocal tone is changing. I’m noticing that I’m bracing. I’m noticing that I’m actually kind of sitting back in my seat. Like I think my body wants distance between this person. I’m noticing I’m holding my breath. I’m noticing the temperature, like I’m really hot. You know, noticing those micro movements of the body. It’s always telling us a story. And then it’s like, okay, I’m experiencing this.

Kimberly Snyder (32:06.766)
Mm.

Brittany Piper (32:26.316)
And then we always ask the question, and what happens next? Is there something my body wants to do to express? And maybe it’s, wow, my body is telling me that it wants to set a boundary right now. It actually wants to tell this person something. Maybe it’s that there’s tears emerging. Maybe it’s that I wanna like shake out my hands. Maybe it’s that I wanna stand up and give myself more space. We said, I wanna leave this room right now and I don’t wanna be with this person.

Kimberly Snyder (32:47.566)
Mm.

Brittany Piper (32:51.672)
So that’s kind of what expressing is, is it’s using movement, vocalizing, know, tears, expression in any way to kind of let the body move through what’s going on, again, with the goal of discharging, like the adrenaline and cortisol. And when that happens, that then leads to a natural discharge, which is expelling of the adrenaline and cortisol, the emotional charge that’s coming up. So that can happen through tears, sweat, trembling, shaking.

You know, things like that. Yeah.

Kimberly Snyder (33:21.411)
Mm.

So what you’re describing sounds really nice and present, this, self-awareness. So it sounds like for situations, if we’re not training in this or we’re new to this, it could be a little bit more mild. But what if we have, or if someone has like a stronger fight response, like the people we know in our lives who get really easily angered, like something happens, it’s almost like you accidentally.

Brittany Piper (33:32.11)
Mm-hmm.

Brittany Piper (33:44.526)
Mm-hmm.

Kimberly Snyder (33:51.864)
know, kick the cat or something and there’s this almost immediate response.

Brittany Piper (33:55.618)
Yes. Yep. So if you or someone who knows can get easily activated into anger, one of the things that I recommend is being proactive and working with anger to discharge in moments when you feel more neutral. for example, we kind of put that into an example. So again, imagine that pressure cooker, right? We have all these like stress hormones that have been building up over time.

Kimberly Snyder (34:12.407)
Mm.

Brittany Piper (34:22.946)
And when you talk about anger, it’s like, it’s not usually the thing that really makes us angry that sets us off. It’s like, they didn’t leave, you know, they didn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste. And now I’m like losing it right now. Or, you know, it’s something small. And that is where like we blow the lid, right? Our pressure cooker explodes. And so it’s more so in moments when I feel neutral, what is some kind of practice that I can do to just gently tap into anger?

Kimberly Snyder (34:28.832)
It’s been built up, yeah.

Kimberly Snyder (34:52.565)
You heard.

Brittany Piper (34:52.91)
as a way to just gently lift that lid and close it back down to get me back to baseline. so in the book, there are somatic practices for anger that people can do in more neutral moments. So for instance, that might just be something like just clenching your fists. And by the way, I this sounds so simple. Somatic work, we like to say, is stupid simple. I have…

I did an SE session with a client today and she’s like, this one thing I’ve been struggling with for six years, I just realized I’m not struggling with it anymore. And it was so subtle, like the way that it just fell away from my life. And so it’s these simple little things that we do that make a really big difference with the nervous system. anyways, clenching your fist. So thinking about again, a moment recently where he felt frustrated by something and then it’s like, can I?

Kimberly Snyder (35:44.736)
What you want to recall that Brit to bring the energy in to work with it.

Brittany Piper (35:48.758)
Yes, yeah, and I wouldn’t recommend going into anything that’s trauma related, but maybe, you know, just a mild moment of like, you know, irritability or like, darn it, I couldn’t find that shirt that I really wanted to wear the other day. And I was so frustrated and flustered, right? So it’s like, as I’m thinking about that, what do I notice in my body? So then you go back into the experience, express, expel. So what do I notice? What am I experiencing? Is there something my body wants to do?

Kimberly Snyder (35:58.391)
Okay.

Brittany Piper (36:16.142)
But you can also use somatic practices too. So like as I’m thinking about that, can I allow my jaw to just be tense right now and just see what happens? Can I allow my shoulder diaphragm to just open up, right? Which sends the signal to our body that like we can take up space right now. Can I do like a Superman pose, right? Which when we have a rigid spine that changes our postural attitude to like be confident or, you know, have some of that healthy aggression.

Can I clench my fists? Can I push on the wall?

Kimberly Snyder (36:47.906)
Well, sorry, Britt, to interrupt, but it sounds like we’re going into the energy instead of maybe intuitively we think, we should relax. Interesting.

Brittany Piper (36:57.696)
It’s, yeah, it’s the opposite. Yeah, so actually an anger, you know, was a big part of my personal journey. You know, I came from some attachment wounds and was separated from my mom at birth because there was methamphetamine found in our system. So was in foster care for some time in the first few months of my life until we were reunited, but I had a lot of fear of abandonment. And so I grew up.

never wanting to rock the boat, never wanting to assert myself, set boundaries in my family. And so I had a very strong fawn response, a very strong anxious attachment. so tapping into anger has been a lot of my personal journey. So I have an entire chapter called rising into power, healthy aggression. I think we commonly think nervous system regulation is about calming down.

Kimberly Snyder (37:49.678)
Mm.

Brittany Piper (37:55.8)
But again, if you think about that ladder, it’s not just being able to like bring ourselves into regulation, it’s also coming up the ladder. So we have to be able to move up the ladder and discharge and express what we’re feeling. And the first step of that is first just noticing that like this experience, this somatic experience, this emotion, this feeling sensation, this is here and it’s allowed to be here. And when we make space for it,

our body naturally knows what to do, whether we start sweating, whether we start trembling, and it’s just observing and seeing what happens next. And the one thing I love to share with people is that it only takes 90 seconds for your body to digest the charge of an emotion, only 90 seconds. But again, when we don’t know the language of our body or we’ve been conditioned that it’s like not safe to feel, it can feel so much more terrifying to even just touch into it.

Kimberly Snyder (38:37.966)
Mmm.

Kimberly Snyder (38:52.27)
Yeah. Well, that’s a powerful message that it is a relatively short time. And one thing I’ve experienced, Britt, with a little bit different modalities working with the heart and the heart coherence is that you do start to reinforce other patterns. So what used to bother me doesn’t bother, you know, it doesn’t bother in the same way. And so it’s so amazing to remember that we’re resilient and we can rewire so we don’t have to feel

that same feeling our whole lives. Because then we’re like prisoners in our nervous system. And all the things that happened in our childhood and all the things we didn’t choose and all the things we didn’t have tools for to cope with.

Brittany Piper (39:24.451)
Yeah.

Brittany Piper (39:28.619)
Absolutely.

Brittany Piper (39:32.896)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think going back to what we talked about kind of at the beginning is that so much of it is again, just coming back into our primal nature, like our body was built. It was designed brilliantly. It knows how to metabolize just like those animals in the wild. It knows how to move through this stuff if we just allow that to happen. And when you do that, yeah, a lot of those patterns do start to kind of fall away.

rewiring and repatterning the nervous system.

Kimberly Snyder (40:06.872)
So do you encourage your clients as well? There’s set tools, but let’s say you are going into some type of response and to also use, encourage, to use your intuition and maybe make shapes that you can’t even explain or to do things with your face to sort of move energy through. Cause that’s been helpful for me at certain times. I’ll get on my yoga mat and just sort of do things versus to have a very set practice. I use it more intuitively.

Brittany Piper (40:25.453)
Yeah.

Brittany Piper (40:31.096)
I love that. Yeah. Absolutely. So I think that tools can be helpful, but they can also be harmful. And I know that’s a big word, but I really do mean that. So at the beginning of part two of the book, which is the Somatic Experiencing Roadmaps, there’s a chapter that says essentially, know, somatic experiencing the basics before you begin.

Kimberly Snyder (40:42.272)
Hmm.

Kimberly Snyder (41:00.75)
Mmm.

Brittany Piper (41:01.112)
And it’s really laying the foundation for exactly what you’re talking about, which is the intention behind using the tools. So the analogy that I like to use, you you see a lot of these tools on social media, like we’re going to do some shakes today, we’re going to do this, going to do that. The intention behind the tools, let me use the analogy, think of your capacity for being and I know we’ve just been talking about anger, so we’ll just continue with anger.

Let’s say that your capacity to be with anger is really small and that when it comes up, your body either autonomically shuts it down and dissociates it or we completely blow over. So think of that as like a hole in the sand on the beach. And the anger, the charge of the anger is the water that goes into this hole. And so it’s not so much that the anger is too big, it’s that our capacity to hold it is too small.

Kimberly Snyder (41:50.307)
Mmm.

Brittany Piper (41:58.582)
And so in somatic work, that’s why we touch in and out of these experiences in a way that feels gentle. And we’re growing our capacity, our resilience to, I just touched into anger in that session a couple of times and it felt okay. And we’re teaching the body that we can do this, right? We’re building that nervous system muscle, that somatic muscle. so now think of your tools, these tools like, know,

Kimberly Snyder (42:04.696)
Mmm.

Kimberly Snyder (42:11.981)
Mm.

Brittany Piper (42:24.152)
clenching your fists or doing wall pushes or shakes or growling, all these things that people might wanna do, think of those as little sand buckets or like little scoops that you can use to get the water out of the hole. So what you often find is that some people just wanna use the tools and anytime there’s any kind of activation or anger, they’re like, where’s my tools? I need to get the tools. But the problem is, is that if we are only ever using the tools to get this stuff out of our body, we are not giving our body the chance to be with

that activation and to allow the water to naturally erode away at that hole and make it bigger. Does that make sense? It’s such a silly analogy, but I really love it.

Kimberly Snyder (43:01.25)
Yes.

It’s almost like the scaffolding helps someone. I heard this analogy once you use the scaffolding to sort of support, but at some point you don’t want the scaffolding there only forever, right? You that strong house.

Brittany Piper (43:13.165)
Exactly. Yes, I like that one. That one might make more sense. Yeah.

Kimberly Snyder (43:19.562)
But I hear what you’re saying because at some point, you we want to feel resilient to deal with whatever life brings us. Tools are there, but in everyday conversation to feel like, this is here, I’m safe, and to carry on with peace and presence.

Brittany Piper (43:26.815)
Exactly.

Brittany Piper (43:38.158)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if we are only ever reaching for the tools, we will always be reaching for the tools, because we’re never giving our body the chance to grow into how to contain and how to be with those emotions and those experiences. And also, when we’re trying to constantly fix, fix or get it out of our body, again, we’re sending kind of that subconscious message of this anger is not allowed to be here, or this anxiety isn’t allowed to be here. And we create what we call these fear.

Kimberly Snyder (43:44.758)
Right.

Brittany Piper (44:07.758)
intentional networks where the body will track for, anxiety is present, we need to get rid of it. And it creates this experience where we’re essentially warring against our body, right? Like our body becomes the threat. So maybe it’s like, I’m feeling anxious because of the way that that person’s body posture is right now. But this anxiety is here and this isn’t allowed to be here. So not only is the nervous system like, that person’s a threat, but the nervous system is now like, and my body is a threat.

Kimberly Snyder (44:37.453)
Mmm.

Brittany Piper (44:37.582)
And what that does is it actually increases the activation in the nervous system. And so Peter often says, Peter Levine is that what we resist in the body will just persist. And so it’s more so like if we just get curious, and I know by the way, this is so much easier said than done. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that can be really intimidating. So like, that’s why I love parts work, internal family systems.

Kimberly Snyder (44:56.462)
and sitting with it, actually letting it be there.

Brittany Piper (45:07.662)
I use that a lot in my practice as well, is like using the language of a part of me feels anxious right now. And then sometimes I’ll ask someone like, if I notice that something feels overwhelming, I might say, is there another part of your body that feels easier to be with? As we’re kind of tracking this anxiousness in your chest, is there another part that feels easier? Yeah, I’m noticing actually the support on my back from this chair, it feels really good on my spine. Yeah, and as you notice that, what are you noticing about the bracing and the anxiety?

Well, it was at like a level 10. Now it’s kind of come down a little bit. It’s like softening. Is that okay to notice? So there’s lots of different tools that you can use to like be with, right? Be with the body so that it doesn’t feel too overwhelming. Yeah.

Kimberly Snyder (45:53.996)
Hmm. And we can feel, we start to feel more safe in our body with whatever is arising. And I love how in that part too, Whitney, you talk about all these different, more specific challenges that can come to mind. mentioned the anger, anxiety, burnout, depression. Thank you so much. I mean, there’s so much we could get into here.

But I just want to say again, thank you so much for bringing this to the forefront, which I do believe could be a really big missing piece for many people’s healing journeys, actually really working with the body, I would say with the heart as well, instead of just the mental place. Is there anything that we didn’t cover, anything you’d love to share about the book that we didn’t get to?

Brittany Piper (46:41.474)
I don’t know. I don’t know anything about the book. think it’s just, again, more so, I think the overall message is, you the thing I love about somatic experiencing is that it’s considered a naturalistic approach to healing. And it’s called natural, it’s considered naturalistic because instead of looking externally for answers or for fixes, we pivot ourselves to kind of turn inward of like, we have the answers in here.

Kimberly Snyder (47:08.109)
Mm-mm.

Brittany Piper (47:11.066)
And so, I think that a good practice of recognizing that we are actually our own best self healers, we just might not know that those tools are there or that capacity is there yet is just something really important to keep in mind. Yeah. Thank you.

Kimberly Snyder (47:25.454)
Beautiful, so empowering. Thank you again, Britt, so much. Congratulations on your new book. once again, the book is called Body First Healing, Get Unstuck and Recover from Trauma with Somatic Healing. Can you share a little bit about where we can get the book? I know it’s probably everywhere. Books are sold. Share with us where to get it.

Brittany Piper (47:33.762)
Thanks again.

Brittany Piper (47:44.982)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. we have, so the book is here in North America and then there are, I think roughly 12 translations right now. They’re gonna be coming out probably in April and May. So if you wanna keep an eye on that list, just go to bodyfirsthealing.com. And I also share updates a lot on my social media pages at Heal with Britt with two T’s.

Kimberly Snyder (48:13.23)
Perfect. Well, thank you so much. Again, just for sharing such a deep, vulnerable place with a true intention to help support others, which really comes across. And thank you everyone so much for tuning in. We will put direct links to Britt’s work and her book and the show notes at mysaluna.com, where we will also link to other articles and podcasts I think you would enjoy. We will be back here as always Thursday for our next Q &A show. So until then, take great care and sending you all so much love.

Overcoming Trauma through Somatic Body Healing with Britt Piper [Episode 1008]

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