113. Your State Creates Your Story: How Unhealed Trauma Shows Up In The Body with Brittany Piper

The following podcast is a deer media production. This is the wellness process, a space where all aspects of well-being coexist harmoniously, from mental and physical health to spirituality and everything in between. I'm your host, Elizabeth Andress, a wellness founder for nearly a decade, but also someone who's really been through it with my share of health challenges. My passion for feeling really good and commitment to the deep inner work have led me to you, where I'll be bringing forward all the modalities that have helped me, and sitting down weekly with the amazing humans that have inspired and expanded me along the way. Through unfiltered conversations with healers, practitioners, founders, and dear friends, together we embark on the process towards our collective wellness. Hello everyone, welcome back to the wellness process podcast. Ooh, I have a good one for you guys today, and I actually just recorded with Brittany Piper, and then I recorded to go on to her. So in the podcasting world, we call this a swap. I don't do this very often because back-to-back episodes can be a lot, but if there's anyone that I will do it with, it is 100% Brittany Piper. Okay, so a lot of you guys probably know who Brittany is. If you do not, you're in for an absolute treat. She is one of the realest, most eloquent, just so well spoken, so understands the mind-body connection and the way that trauma stores in the body like nobody else. And I will just give a trigger warning, because in today's episode, Brittany shares quite a bit of her story. She is so brave in telling her story of losing her brother and also surviving sexual assault. So I will just give that trigger warning. We do talk about sexual assault in this episode, and Brittany is just so brave. She is such a survivor. She turned her pain into purpose in one of the most immense ways that I've seen. And she created her own method. She's trained in somatic experiencing. She is trained in IFS, and she has her own online community. She wrote a book, and she has a podcast. So there are so many ways that you can follow up with this and learn more about Brittany, because I know so many of you guys are going to want to after this episode. She's so vulnerable, honest, raw, and inspiring, ultimately. I can't wait for you guys to get to know her a little bit deeper. Welcome, Britt. I'm so excited to have you here. Thank you. I've been looking forward to this. Likewise, I just, there are certain people that come on the podcast where I'm like, I just know this is going to flow because we have such an aligned view, and it is so nice to sit down with someone that really gets it. Yeah. So excited to dive into it today. I know you talk a lot in your work about how healing is not a one size fits all. And, you know, obviously we will get into the idea of developing chronic symptoms and things and how it can be born through the body. And I talk about that a lot on my podcast, of course. A lot of times when I'm talking about that, it is coming from a place of little tea traumas, the small things that add up from childhood, different personality types, and things like that. And it's not often that on this podcast, we get into the big T. And I think that's really important because whether it's autoimmune or gut issues or panic attacks, all these things that so many people and especially women are suffering from, stem from the big T trauma. So, you know, just getting right into it. I would love if you can just start us at the beginning of your story as far as you want to go back to kind of paint the picture of the things that you have personally been through. Oh man, how far back do we go? Yeah, you know, trauma is interesting because I think we often think of trauma as something that happens directly to us. You know, these things, I always say, like they, they're these events that leave these, these craters in your life that are like undeniable. But when we look at forms of indirect trauma, like intergenerational trauma, the trauma that's passed down through, like lineage and family and maybe even like when we were in the womb, that's trauma that can be really confusing to grapple with, to heal. So for me, I feel like my story kind of starts there in the ways that the women in my family and generations before learned to manage stress and challenges and to armor up in the nervous system. I come from a very long line of, and I'm using air quotes here, successful, hyper independent women who had this belief that they were going to be left and that they had to go it alone. And so there was a lot of muscling up and armoring up, and it's a beautiful thing because I actually have a background in women's studies. My grandmother was a part of the feminist movement, like new glorious dinam. And so I'm of the belief that women should be empowered and individualistic and successful. And all of those things, but not at the cost of their own health. And so that's actually, I feel like we're a lot of my trauma has stemmed from. And then following that, it's like, okay, well, what did I carry on? That's what I carried on. Which is an important piece that I feel like not a lot of people realize. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And they say that trauma can get passed down within three to five generations through DNA, through our genes, through our belief systems, our patterns. And so I've definitely seen that play out in my life. And I've had to do a lot of course correcting after cycles and seasons of extreme burnout as a mom, as an entrepreneur, as a wife. And just realizing, like, I was living a pace that wasn't my own and that my nervous system. Like, I was paying the cost for that. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. Like right now, but if we talk about where the trauma really, really started, it started at birth for me. When I was born, my mom was really young. She was a single parent. She was 19. She had already had my brother. And when she was pregnant with me, she was actually homeless and living out of a car, living off of food stamps, and addicted to drugs, while she was pregnant. So when I was born, I was actually taken from my mother by child protective services. And I was put into foster care for the first few months of my life because there was methamphetamine found in my system. And you know, a lot of the work that I do as a somatic practitioner is also intersected with like internal family systems and inner child work and attachment work is a huge part of the work that I provide. So being without the care and bonding and love and attunement of my mother for those first few months of life, I know had a large imprint on me. And I actually didn't know that story until I was 15. I was reunited with my mom after a few months and it's interesting because she like she got her again, air quotes. She got her life on track. She became wildly successful and she's one of the strongest people that I know. But growing up, there was this like dark cloud that kind of followed me around like I didn't feel good enough. I didn't feel wanted. I felt like I always had to prove myself and you didn't obviously know where it was coming from, which probably made it even harder. Exactly. Yeah. And even though like I can't consciously remember those months of my life and being in the womb in the somatic world, which means just of the body in the somatic space, we work less with conscious or explicit memory and more with subconscious or what we call implicit memory, which is memory of the body. And implicit memory starts to form at seven weeks in the womb. So yeah, so things like, you know, I remember the first son of grandma solved my son and he's like sucking his thumb like that's muscle memory. It's a way that he soothing itself himself, you know. And so a lot of the work that we do in the somatic space can be tied back to trauma in the womb, birth trauma, trauma in your nonverbal years in the first three years. And we know that our attachment and our relational patterns are actually usually formed by the time that we're 18 months old. Wow, which surprises people because they're like, how did I form my tat like my relationship style by the time I was 18 months old and I'm like, it's all muscle memory. It's all just impulse and instinct that you picked up on as a baby. I'm getting sidetracked, but all that to say that's kind of where the interest is. Yeah, it really speaks to how important the subconscious mind is. Yes. And how much that dictates pretty much everything we have going on in our life. It runs the show. Yeah. And it's his name. Joe dispenses. It's a. How did you know that's why that's a wild. Okay, so Joe dispenses says that the subconscious mind is the body. And so that's what we tap into. We work with the body to work with the subconscious mind. And the subconscious mind runs 90% of our programming in our everyday life. And so. So anyways, that's where you know, the trauma really began. And it was really kind of invisible to me. And when I was told that that's what had happened. I was like, oh my gosh, it makes so much sense. But at the age of 15, that's also when I lost my brother. So when we start to talk about things like big tea trauma, my older brother Dominic was killed in a car accident when we were in high school. And that was so sorry. Thank you. That was almost that was 2004, February 2004. So yeah, the 22 year anniversary is coming up. But yeah, that was hard. And the way that my family deals with trauma and adversity and hardship is we just started the rug and we move on. So like my parents were back at work, kind of like within less than a week. And again, you just like. like you shoulder it, you muscle through, you armor up and you move on. And were you able to do that in the way that they were? - No, no. - So I started resorting to like really heavy drinking and of course in high school, it's like so easy to do, right? I was doing drugs and drinking and then I went off to college and my first year of college, I ended up having alcohol poisoning. - I flat lined at the hospital. I was taken in an ambulance, yeah. And so I left that school. It was like, surely it's the environment around me. - Yes, that's the school. - Yeah, it's the school. It's my sports team that I'm on. I need to go home and so I went home, but it wasn't the outer environment. It was my internal world that really needed tending to. And so yeah, losing him was hard. That was one of those like crater moments, you know? And I just didn't know how to fill the void. He and I were incredibly close. My mom wasn't around a lot growing up because she was working so much. And so yeah, we were thick as thieves. That was really hard to deal with. And then when I was 20, I was sexually assaulted by a stranger who helped me change my flat tire. And so the work that I, a lot of the work that I do today, and that was back in 2009, but since 2012, I've worked as an advocate and an educator in the sexual violence prevention space. Because for most survivors, there's the experience of the assault, which is traumatic in and of itself. Like your body is, there's so many boundary ruptures that happen. Of course, there's so much agency and choice that's taken from you. It is the worst kind of violation. And so you have to grapple with that. But then for most survivors, there's the separate trauma of what happens in the aftermath, which is like not being believed, being blamed, being ridiculed. And even though my situation was very black and white, and this man was sentenced to 60 years in prison, there was still a lot of blame and judgment of like, why did you let him into your car and you should have known better? And so I became determined to make sure that no one else experienced the same thing. And that took me on a wild path of working all over the world in rape crisis and trauma centers. And that's where my work kind of began working in the trauma space. So it was the worst and best thing that happened to me because it was very confronting. So yeah, that's a little bit of my story. Thank you so much for sharing that. And for being so vulnerable and open. And you are helping so many people as you know. And it's incredible to also see someone going through an immense amount of pain and suffering and turning that really into purpose and helping other people because that is ultimately the absolute best thing that you can do for everybody else and yourself. I think it's speaking from my own experience, which is not comparable at all, but it is the most healing way to wake up every day is knowing that you are helping other people through something similar that you can deeply empathize with. I know that after your sexual assault, I read, or maybe it was your video that I watched, that you really needed to hear that it wasn't your fault. Can you share a little bit more about what you needed during that time, how people kind of acted and what would have been helpful for you? Yeah. Oh yeah. So maybe I'll give just like a little bit of detail into kind of just where it stemmed from because I left out. I left out that what happened in the aftermath of the assault is that I, you know, similar to I ended up in a hospital bed with alcohol poisoning in college here. I actually ended up in a jail cell. So I'll get to that in a second. But I'll lead you to what, how I got there. So yeah, so you know, after the assault had happened like directly after I was visibly beaten with a tire iron. I was brutally beaten with a tire iron. And so I had a lot of lacerations and injuries to my face and my body. And I remember driving home. I was 20 years old at the time. I was a college student. I had been out with my friends like drinking, dancing, having fun off campus. And I realized I had left my phone at a friend's purse. So I ventured out in the middle of the night to get my phone from her. On the way there, hit a pothole, pulled into a gas station. And there was this stranger there who helped me change my flat tire. As a way of saying thank you, I repeatedly offered him money, but he kept just insisting I give him a ride. So reluctantly and after some time, I did let him into my car. And then, and then I was brutally raped and beaten. And then he let me go on my way. I remember begging and pleading that like he not take my life because I didn't want my parents to lose another child. And sorry. So I think maybe that's something about that struck a chord with him. And he let me live and he let me go. And he even gave me directions of how to get home. And I got home and my best friend who had been out with me that night. She was asleep on the couch and walking in the door, like screaming, crying, like this bloody mess. Oh my God. I woke her up. I told her what happened and her response was, go to bed, sleep it off. Let's talk in the morning. And so for me, that was-- Yes. So that was like just the immediate response was, I'm not worth-- there was this sense of like worthiness, unworthiness and shame that really came up. And like I'm alone in this and I have to face this on my own. And so I went upstairs and as I desperately tried to crime myself asleep, my roommate, someone else in the home, she came into my room and she just stood in the doorway. And like she didn't have to ask any questions, which is what a lot of survivors face. Like, well, but why did it happen? Where were you? What was going on? She just looked at me and she picked me up out of that bed, like Superman style. Like she physically carried me down the stairs. She placed me in the front seat of her car. She drove me to the hospital and she called my parents on the way. Wow. And-- Oh, I have full body chills. I think if it hadn't been for her, I don't know that I ever would have-- I was 20 years old, and I was drinking, and I didn't want to get in trouble again. And I had already been blaming myself. My gosh, you're so stupid, Brittany. You let him into your car. And so I think we often think that like the superheroes in our lives are the people who are up on a stage or on a podcast or writing books or doing these big things. Like when we talk about purpose. And I think the most heroic thing that someone can do is just meet you, like not just love you, but like see you and witness you in your pain, and choose to carry it with you quite literally. And so I look back on that as like I really feel like that friend saved my life. Absolutely. Yeah, so it doesn't have to be these big things. But yeah, following that though, there were people in my community who made comments on the news articles. She let them into a car. You know, all of that. And so plus this man had been in and out of the prison system his entire life. So he knew how to work the system. So our case was postponed or what they call continued nine times. A lot of survivors face this when they are in a case where they have really hard proof that like indisputable evidence that they were assaulted. The defense will use a strategy of prolonging the trial and postponing it as a way to like emotionally wear down the victim until they give up. And so every time it was continued over those two years, I had to go through like a dress rehearsal. And that was like exposure. Oh my god. Over and over again. Yeah. So they'd like relive every graphic detail, go through the tape statements, pretend being on the witness stand. And so I was really dissociated in my life. But behind the scenes, I was heavily drinking. I found myself in an abusive relationship. We could do an entire episode on that. You name it, I was probably dealing with it. And then he was sentenced. And I think I always thought like once he sentenced, if and when he is convicted and sentenced, I'll be back to normal. Because I was getting very like angry all the time, which is not in my nature. I'm a very like soft person. Right. I like to think of course. And less than 30 days after I found myself in a jail cell. So I was out with my boyfriend who was drinking and driving. And I would say that's like a really good indication of where I was at at the time in my life. Yeah. He was pulled over and arrested. And when the police officers went to pull me out of the car, I had a flashback. Just give me a ride. I had a flashback of the night of my assault of being touched by a man in a car. And in my impaired state, I snapped. And I tried to fight back. And so, and that was my nervous system trying to complete what it couldn't do in that car previously. Yeah. Because I was so cleared. Yeah. So I was put into a jail cell with two counts of battery on an officer with injury. And my parents left me there for a couple of days because they really wanted me to like learn the lesson. I remember my dad saying, if you don't learn how to stop running from this, like you're going to kill yourself. And the turning point for me was going before the judge as I was exiting, like going through processing. And she knew who I was. She looked like Judge Judy. I always feel like I want to show that. Oh, we all have a visual. We all have a strong visual. Yeah, she was great, though. And she just said, I know you are from the sexual assault case. And she said, you need to learn how to live with your pain better. And that was just that kind of turn, key moment. Because she didn't say you need to learn how to get past there to get over it, which is what I had always thought was so necessary, which probably felt impossible. Yeah. And then you'd go in a different direction. So that was in 2011. And since then, I've just kind of made it like my mission to just like radically, when I experienced pain and suffering and trauma, just know like radically face it and move toward it and not move away from it. (soft music) I always notice it most when I've been away, traveling, or just away from home in general for a few days. 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Just use my code wellness for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. You have been through so much. And it's really amazing that the comment from one person-- sometimes it's just, first of all, it can go in either direction as you've showed. The person that doesn't show the support or attention to care that is needed. And the person, the judge that makes one comment, that kind of shifts that lens. When that registered with you, what did that actually start to look like in practice in day to day? That's such a good question. So up until that point, I had actually been going to therapy. I had been in traditional therapy for a number of years at that point. I had also been on a number of medications for anxiety, depression. But I felt like I kept hitting this wall. I could comprehend and I could understand and I could see all of the patterns and all of the trauma. And I could talk about it until I was blue in the face. But living in my body was so unbearable. And when I was in that jail cell, there were moments where there were no more pills. There was no more alcohol. This shitty relationship to distract me. There was nothing between me. No, I couldn't numb at all. And so I was forced to really sit in it. And over those couple of days, my body had these really intense reactions. I would assume it's what drug withdrawal would look like. There was shaking. There was trembling. There was emoting. There was so much crying. There was sweating. And I remember leaving feeling different in my body. And it's hard to put it into words what that really felt like. And so I went to my therapist. And I told her what the judge had said. And I also said, I feel something feels different. I feel lighter. I feel taller. I also have more clarity. I feel more present. My senses are tuned into the world. What is going on? And so she recommended that I also start working with a somatic therapist. And that changed everything for me. Because it was less about talking. And it was more about feeling into the pain. And what had not been yet processed through the body and metabolized. And then I just became obsessed. You know, right? You know how I know? Of course. Yeah. You get a little taste to one thing. And you're like, I need to know all about this. And so living with the pain became more of an embodied practice of when grief comes up. How can I make room for it rather than push it away? And I think a lot of it used to be that, again, I would armor up. I would muscle against or resist. Any kind of discomfort in my body. And now it was like, this is here for a reason. This is my body working for me, not against me. My body is so wise when you learn the science of how your symptoms make so much sense. And it's just self-preservation and it's survival. And it's just your body's inherent wisdom to keep you safe. There's so-- like that resistance that you have against yourself just really starts to dampen. And there's so much self-trust that comes of like, I actually-- I've had all the answers all along. And so I know that's like a big answer. But yeah, a lot of it was an embodied practice of learning to be with the pain. And then that changed just my cognitive perspective of myself and how I show up in the world. Everything. Yeah. So much to discuss in this. Knowing what you know now and being such an expert in the somatic space, what was happening in that jail cell in your body? Yeah. Was that stored trauma releasing? Yeah. So that's what we call discharge. So the modality that I'm professionally trained in is-- and there's lots of modalities out there. We're kind of talking earlier. I think like there's EMDR. There's internal family systems. There's hypnosis. There's so many different things. Journal speak. So I am trained among many things. But mainly I lead with my somatic experiencing hat. So somatic experiencing is a modality that was developed by Dr. Peter Levine in the '70s. And it's based on ethylogy, which is the study of animals in the wild. So Peter asked the question, why is it that animals in the wild who are routinely facing threat? They're consistently in these survival responses. These stress responses, a fight, flight, freeze, fun. Why don't they remain traumatized? Whereas human animals-- because we have the same biological nervous systems as animals in the wild-- we just also have this wonderful conscious cognitive brain, too, that talks us out of our feelings. Do animals have an amygdala? Yes, they do. And even still, they're not phased by the lions. They're actually chasing after them. No. And if you think about-- like, I always use an example of a mama bear, a mama bear with her cubs. And she's being circled by some kind of-- I don't know-- other apex predator. She's not going to start thinking. She doesn't have this wonderful human brain. We have like, is it OK to plough right now? Should I show my teeth? Am I being too much? Am I going to be judged? She follows the primal and instinctual impulses of the body. And the nervous system-- no, I'm going to defend. And so she goes into that healthy aggressive response, that fight response. So what Peter learned was that animals have this stress or this threat response cycle, where when they're faced with threat-- and for us, it could just be like someone sending us a text message that felt a little off or something. And then our nervous system is like, what is going on? And we go into those-- So we easily-- So we easily-- from a text message, too. Agreed example. There's our tiger chasing us down. But what happens is that if we don't allow for the body to metabolize the adrenaline and cortisol that comes from those fight-or-flight responses, which mobilize us to fight-or-free, then those stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, get trapped within the body. And it becomes chronic stress. And we know that chronic stress then creates chronic conditions. So-- Beautiful explanation that I think so many people need to hear, because it needs to make sense for us. Yeah. Otherwise, we can't believe in it. And that's a huge piece of it, for sure. Yeah, so an easy way to think of it is what was happening in that jail cell was that was all the pent-up adrenaline and cortisol throughout my lifetime. And the lifetimes before-- when you look at, for instance, like-- we talk about altered stress hormones, the epigenetic studies that they did at Mount Sinai for the Holocaust survivors, Rachel Yehuda and her team. I think this was in the 2000s. But they monitored and measured the level of stress hormones that descendants of the Holocaust had compared to non-discindance of not Holocaust survivors and they found that descendants even though, you know, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, they didn't experience a Holocaust but they had like remarkably higher altered stress hormones. Wow. So again, these are things that we carry with us and so it's when we talk about like cycle breakers like we really are like healing the lines and the lineage that came before and that's hard but it also comes with a certain like resilience too that we inherit which I think is really beautiful. I think sometimes we're like, oh, I got passed on all this trauma. Yeah, but it's also like but I also was passed down so much beautiful resilience too, you know. So in that jail cell, that's what my body was doing and what Peter found and what somatic experiencing practitioners do is we are ethylgous. We as we're sitting in a session with a client, we can notice body temperature, we can notice fascia movement, we can notice breath patterns. So we track body patterns that show us areas where the body is stuck in survival and so for instance, if someone is constantly like looking down, if they have more of a hunch to their shoulders, if their breath is more shallow, if they're more pale, if there's little emotion, then they're probably stuck in like a shutdown or kind of like a free state and then we are trained to help them come out of those stuck states. So anyway, it's going back to the jail cell. My body was discharging and that's what animals do in the wild. They shake, they tremble. I would encourage anyone who's listening to just go to YouTube right now and type in animal discharging and you will see countless videos of polar bears, impala, zebra's, possums, rabbits, animals that go into these states of collapse or like freeze, they play, they play dead, like their body goes in tonic and mobility. And then as they come out, it's like you notice their breath starts catching again and then there's trembling and shaking. And usually if you look up the polar bear one, I love the polar bear one, you'll see that they go back into what we call preparatory or defensive movements. So the polar bear as he comes out of this like fanatose, his arms and legs start moving like they're running. So he's completing what he couldn't do when he was trying to get away from when he from what was happening. Yeah. And so as humans, our bodies work in the same way and our nervous system works in the same way. So when we have all this adrenaline and cortisol, we can get stuck in these loops where it's like, yeah, we always are running away from things because that's what we learned as a child. Right. And so there are ways that we can let the body release and discharge those stress hormones, but that it doesn't just stop there because then we also have to start changing the muscle memory or what we call the procedural patterns, which is the subconscious ways that we want to run away, you know, in relationships or when conflict arises. Yeah, there's a lot of layers to it, but that's kind of where it starts is with the body. Okay. I want to dissect both of those things. Yeah. First, for the person that gets the text message, more the email or has the conflict with their partner and feels starts to feel that adrenaline and cortisol, we can all feel that feeling at us right now, right? What is a good tip for someone to do the animal discharge sort of in the moment or, you know, just like a tangible for someone to take away? Yeah. I love that question. So in somatic experiencing, soma means of the body and somatic experiencing the intention behind it is to be in the experience of your body. So oftentimes like when we feel adrenaline and cortisol, people think like, I just need to get it out. I just need to get it out. And that can be good, right? But we also at the same time want to create a greater capacity to be with activation or discomfort or the adrenaline and cortisol. So I call it the three E's. The first thing we want to do is we want to experience, notice the experience of the body. So how do you know your body is experiencing that adrenaline right now? And can you just track it and observe it for like 60 seconds? And it might feel unbearable. But so you're like, my heart is racing. I'm sweating. I feel anger like that kind of thing in your head. Yeah. Yeah. And you can track it through. There are five elements of a feeling that we track in somatic experiencing. And it's called side-bam. So is there a sensation that you notice? Like constriction or you know, tightness or hollowness or tension, whatever that is. Is there an image? So for some people, they have a really hard time tracking their body, but they can visualize something like as the tears are coming, it feels like a waterfall or like a fire hydrant or a color. The B in side-bam is behavior. And that's is your body doing something. So maybe your posture is changing. Maybe your foot is going up and down because you feel fidgety. A is affect, which is emotion. So you just said anger. A lot of people have really great emotional language. And then M is meaning. So sometimes we can go to meaning. Like what's the story that I'm telling myself right now? Like this person's out to get me or this is just going to, you know, not go the way I wanted it to. So you can explore side-bam. And so again, for 60 seconds, what's the experience that I'm having? And can you stay with yourself? Sometimes we focus too much on what can I do to regulate? But we're doing it from a place where the relationship to ourself is a place of I need to fix myself right now. Avoiding the feeling, which is really the whole problem. Yes. Exactly. So if we're doing it to get out of ourselves and get out of our body, and we are always going to be doing these regulating practices. So again, how do you experience it? Once you've done that, then you work on expressing. And you can ask the question like, is there something my body naturally wants to do? We want to explore like a natural impulse first, rather than forcing something like a scream or raging. We usually actually don't do that in SE work, somatic experiencing. Interesting. We don't do a lot of catharsis because it can overwhelm the nervous systems. We work with like micro movements or impulses. So instead of like, for instance, in a session, I might be like, instead of like screaming or punching a pillar right now, can we just visualize that for a moment and see what happens. And we give it like 30 seconds, which feels like an eternity. And the client might start being like, I'm trembling or I'm feeling a lot of heat in my armpits, like even just visualization. And that right there feels less overwhelming to the nervous system. Because the reason the nervous system got stuck in the first place is because it felt like too much back then. Right. Right. So we want to like slow it down and make it more tolerable. So you experience, then you express, and as you express, that leads to the expelling. So the expressing could be like, my body wants to move in some way or there's tears coming up or there's something I want to say. And it's in that expressing that the expelling or discharge happens. Ways that you know that discharge is happening. I'll just throw this in there is, it usually happens through the limbs or the periphery. So through the hands, the feet, legs, arms, you might notice a cooling or a tingling that's being followed by heat. And that's usually the adrenaline cortisol coming up out of the body. So usually like perspiration and heat followed by coolness. It could be a yawn. It could be a little tremble or a shake, a spontaneous sigh. So those are all ways even just think of like a dog like shaking. That's a dog discharging and kind of transitioning out. So that's what you can track and kind of look forward to. And so when people work with you, what are the ways that they can do that? Because I'm sure we're going to have a lot of people that are listening that are interested in your program and the different modalities that you're incorporating during those. Yeah. So the, you know, I used to, I used to do one-on-one work right now. I'm only working with one person and we've already shared it publicly. I work with Sammy. Sammy's my one client that I work with. Oh, amazing. But the ways that people can do this work now alongside me is in the body first healing program. So back in 2017, I put together a group program that helps people to process trauma through the body first, not body only because cognitive work is still so important. But what I found in like in my, you know, 37 now, and in like my early to mid 20s, I had to go to different therapists for different modalities. Totally. Right. Like it was expensive. It was frustrating because I felt like I was dating all these people at one time and there was consumer. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes they're the crossover wouldn't really align. And so what I wanted to do was create a place where it could be like a one-stop shop for people to explore all of the different modalities that I feel like are really can be beneficial for healing trauma. So in the body first healing program over six months, we explore polyvagal theory. I was trained at the polyvagal institute. So that's the newest research on the nervous system. We also explore somatic experiencing, of course. And we'll explore the modalities of internal family systems. That's inner child work. But I practice that through somatic more of a somatic lens. Somatic attachment therapy. We practice. So those four modalities are kind of the one stop shop. And I look at healing. You kind of started this off as like healing is not one-size-fits-all. I love the analogy of healing like is like a big old pie. And everyone has different slices. And those slices they they can change over time too. Right. Because for me early on like there are certain modalities that landed so well in certain seasons of life. And now I'm like other ones are better for me now. So yes, I think we have to also allow ourselves to be fluid in that way, especially the personality type that tends to have a lot of chronic conditions can be very rigid and perfectionistic. And I even find myself, I talked to Nicole about it. And she's like, you've been doing journal speak for two years now. You can also not do it every day. And I'm like, what? So I think we need to know that there are different seasons and different things that are gonna feel good. And I really feel like a product of this kind of nervous system regulation work is becoming way more attuned to your gut. Yeah. Being able to say yes and no to things with so much more clarity because there isn't so much noise. Yes. I love coffee and I have for a very long time, but coffee doesn't generally love me back. I love the taste, the ritual, the feeling of starting the day with something warm, but too much caffeine can send me straight into feeling anxious, wired, and somehow exhausted all at the same time. That's why I started using mud water. What I like is that they created something for people who still want to experience coffee without the full caffeine hit. 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After your purchase, they'll ask you how you found them. Please let them know that we sent you. There is a big difference between having a thought and feeling like you can't get away from it. I think a lot of people have experienced that in some way. I thought that shows up and instead of passing it sticks, it loops and you just find yourself trying to make sense of it or push it away, but it just keeps coming back. Sometimes it's not the thought itself. It's how long it stays. You try to move on, distract yourself, rationalize it, and somehow it keeps looping back in a way that feels exhausting. For a lot of people that experience can be connected to OCD. OCD doesn't always look the way people expect. It can show up around relationships, health, morality, identity, usually the things that matter most to you. And because it's often misunderstood, a lot of people spend years not realizing what they're dealing with or that there's a real treatment available. That's where no CD comes in. No CD is the world's leading provider of specialized OCD treatment. And their therapists are trained in exposure and response prevention or ERP therapy, which is considered the most effective treatment for OCD. Everything is virtual. They accept insurance for over 138 million Americans. And they provide support between sessions so you're never navigating it on your own. If this feels familiar for you or someone you care about, it's worth learning more. Go to nocd.com and book a free 15-minute call. That's nocd.com. Can you dive a little bit more into that as well as like the manifestation piece and the way that our lives can kind of shift and change because we've regulated our systems? Yeah. So I love the statement from the Polyvago world, which is that your state creates your story. Ooh, yeah. So good. Love that. So like the nervous system state that you're in is going to create the story. That's down. Yeah, it is going to create or really inform like the stories, not just of your life, but the stories that you tell yourself. Like when you're it just think like when you're in a fight response and you're like chronically there, you're pissed off at everything. Like you're mad at the weather, you're mad at the TV, you're mad at your, you're mad at everyone. Everything. Everything, right? Yes. And so, you know, all of that is guided by the physiological and neuroanatomical components that are happening in the body. And so there's only so much mindset work that you can do. The nervous system doesn't operate from the conscious mind. It operates from the subconscious, which is the emotional brain, the limbic system, and the reptilian brain, which is the brain stem. And the language of those two regions of the brain are emotion, sensation, and impulse. And so that's why we can't like tell ourselves, you know, something we can't think our way into regulation and into a regulated life. We have to feel and show our way there. And so when we talk about manifestation work, a lot of it is based on your nervous system's capacity to hold more. A lot of people think that regulation is about, you know, being calm all the time, but like capacity is also the ability to be with like healthy activation. You know, to have a big life, you have to have big capacity. And that means you have to be willing to like be in a really healthy fight response to like assert boundaries. The word, the word aggression, which is our fight response, comes from the Latin joining of odd and graudi, which means to propel. So like aggression is what helps us propel in life. And if we don't have the capacity to be with anger, like those of us who grew up in environments where it was wielded against us or it wasn't modeled in a healthy way. And this was me, by the way. So now it's like, I would fawn and I would people please. And I would play K and I wouldn't set boundaries and I'd prioritize others. You know, that the life that I was living in the stories that I was living was a direct mirror of my nervous system. Exactly. Yeah. And so the capacity building is not just like, can I be happy and calm and like now I'm going to manifest my perfect life? It's also like, can you be in the aliveness of your body? Like can you be with like deep pain and suffering? But trust that like you're going to get through it and you're resilient. Can you be with anger and let that like guy do in really healthy ways? You know, so I don't know if that makes sense. Or if I'm just talking in the clouds perfectly says. Yeah. I think it's also there is this shift from, you know, circumstances that aren't in your favor no longer making you feel like a victim. Yeah. You know, whether it's the little day to day things or the chronic conditions and pain. Mm-hmm. All of that becomes, and I don't know, maybe that's like there's like a hormonal or chemical situation that's happening that like, you're just no longer so mad about everything. When you start to find a way to feel it and release it. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I think too it's we start to recognize that like the bad comes with the good and the good comes with the bad. You know, and that like things are temporary. And I think when you've survived and made it through really difficult things and also too, I will say that like the little T big T trauma, one of the things that I often get from people when they hear my story because I do professional speaking. Mm-hmm. And I talk a lot to college students and like what I will get a lot after these programs is students coming up and the first thing they'll say is like, my story is nothing like yours. And I always want to remind them that like it's less about the event and what happened to you. It's less about the trauma and more so about how your body is holding it or refusing to hold it. And so for some of us like what feels like a big T trauma might not be a big T trauma to someone else. So share with people a little bit more about what your life looks like now. You know, just really being on the other side of a lot. And also tools that you're actually specifically using on a day to day basis to maintain this state. Yeah. Man, my life looks so different than what I ever imagined. I will just say that. It looks so wildly different. So life today looks like working actually like part time, which is not something I ever thought that I would say. I actually, I'm a homeschool mom. So I homeschool my son Noah. He's in kindergarten on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then he's at like a hybrid school on Mondays and Wednesdays. And then yeah, Mondays and Wednesdays are my work days. And a lot of that consists of showing up for my my group container, the body first healing program. We do multiple live calls every single week. So I spend a lot of time with that group, which is amazing. And my kind of daily routine is that I'm usually the first one up in my home. Like I love being up before the sun and just like those quiet hours are the best. Yeah. And so it looks the same every morning I wake up. I open all the windows in the house. And then I do either like a devotional or journal or some kind of reading for like 20 minutes. I then go out to the gym. We built a gym in our garage and I go and I work out for a little bit. I usually run and hike on my Nordic track. I do some weightlifting. Weightlifting has been really, really healthy for me. I grew up in athlete, but lifting heavy just helps me feel more in my body. So I love weightlifting. And then I will usually go on like a sunrise walk with my dog for like 15 or 20 minutes. So good. And then I get back and everyone's usually waking up. And so just like that hour in the day helps me set the intention for the rest of the day. And I think that oftentimes people think they have to do like a million things to like stay well or stay regulated. And it's actually more just about consistency. If you can commit to something on a consistent basis, what you're doing is you're creating routine and familiarity. And another little tagline for the nervous system is same equals safe. If it's familiar and if it feels the same, then the nervous system is like, oh, this is predictable. This is great. I don't have to work it, you know, to understand what's going to happen. So I do these little routines no matter where I'm at in the world. And I travel a lot for work when I am speaking. And so yeah, that little, those little morning routines really like help me. But I really prioritize in my life, like slowing down, unplugging, trying so hard to not be on my phone because I don't want my kids to just stare at the back of a screen, you know? Yeah, like growing up, it was the back of my mom's computer. And now it's like, oh, I don't want them to stay in the back of my phone. Yeah, it's hard. You know, spending time with with my husband and then we love being out in nature. We recently just bought land in Montana, 10 acres. And so we're building a home and also the body first healing institute. I'm amazing. Yeah, I now train other practitioners. So starting this past year, we were now doing our first cohort for the body first healing institute for the somatic practitioner training, which is incredible. And we're going to start doing in-person trainings in Montana in 2027. But I just love being outdoors and being in places where it's quiet and solitude. Yeah. Do you feel like I really noticed your emphasis on being part-time? Curious about this because I've been not feeling like I want to be part-time, but I've been noticing that sometimes less output is actually more for me in terms of quality over quantity. Yeah. And not burning myself out. I'm actually better off only working a couple days a week. Yeah. Has that been sort of part of your process to getting to that place? Yeah. For me, I think it was, again, going back to the course correcting. I had to go through a couple of unfortunate seasons of burnout, which was a bit of a reckoning for me. And I'm like, you know, I'm in bed after I had my daughter and I'm taking work meetings like five days after her birth. Wow. And realizing this is not healthy and it's not sustainable. And so I scaled way back in my business. I was running a full practice and a team at the time and I decided it's just going to be me and me alone and then an awesome little team of people that helped me. But I couldn't oversee practitioners anymore. And so I really had to step away and it felt really aligned. I was starting to daydream about going off to the mountains. Wow. And like I wanted to turn off my phone. And there were some days where I just wanted to throw my phone across the room. And like this is not my body is telling me something like there's these impulses that like my gut and my body is telling me this doesn't feel good. And this is not a pace that I can sustain. And actually it's no longer a pace again. That is my own. And so I think that's one of the beautiful things about doing like nervous system and somatic work is you said intuition. Like you really start to align with like what is for me and what's not for me? Yes. You know, and so my yeses and my nose have just become so much louder in my body. But yeah, just having those few dedicated days to focus on work helps me to just like be present and be in the deep end rather than just floating around in the shallow end every day and being like I'm here, but I'm not here. You know, it's efficiency as well. You mentioned that you have two kids. Yeah. I'm curious how the work that you do, how are you applying it to raising children and you know, kind of teaching them. I assume some level of these modalities at a young age. What does that look like? Yeah. Oh man, I used to post videos with my son Noah of like little somatic practices that we would do like when he was angry. We'd do like dinosaurs, stomps or like lion growls. And you know, I think a lot of it, well first of all when you become a parent, oh my gosh, there are certain parts of your brain that wake up again. You know, like there's science to that. There are certain parts of your brain that wake up. And these are little parts of you, younger parts of you that maybe were suppressed. And so you can find that like you're easily triggered. Those parts of you can get easily triggered when your children are at the ages that you experience that hurt. Interesting. Yeah. And not only that as, you know, especially in mothers, your amygdala goes through the most intense kind of, you know, activation when you become a mother because there are those, you know, maternal instincts that really do kick in. You know, you hear moms who are like my, my baby was sleeping next to me or in the crib and like they made a sound and like my whole body just woke up. Yeah. There are certain things that happen that just make you more instinctually like protective. And so for me, the work that I do is how that shown up in parenting is recognizing that I can't control or change my children. I can only control, not even control, but I can only regulate myself. Yes. And that children. Yes. Exactly. And that children, the attachment research shows they learn how to co-regulate before they learn how to self-regulate. So this whole, you know, concept we've had about like self-suiting and how babies do that. They don't learn how to self-suit first. They learn how to soothe through others. And so they borrow our nervous system for the first, I'd say at least six to seven years of their life, which just goes to show how heavily impacted we can be by those around us. Exactly. And so, but that's also given me a lot of permission to like focus sometimes less on like what they're feeling and just focus on myself and know that like I am the mirror for them. And that if I can regulate myself, they're going to pick up on that. And so yeah, it just kind of brings some of the pressure down. And then I would say the only the other thing too is repairing. Like it's actually really healthy. And the science, the research shows us to this all in my book, by the way, body for stealing. There's the biggest chapter is actually the attachment chapter for a reason. But our ability to repair when there's a rupture. Like when there is a moment with your child where like you've been a little like you maybe spoke a little too loud or you were too over the top or you had to run away or whatever it is. It's less about the rupture and it's more about the repair. And because that's actually what builds a stronger bond. And even if you think about like with a partner or someone that you love, your ability to come back and say like I'm sorry and talk it through everything. It's everything, right? And then like you'll wake up the next day and just be like I feel so much closer to you. It actually ends up being a good thing. Oh, it's such a good thing. It's so healthy. And so that's why I find it's a shame sometimes when parents feel like they can't mess up in front of their kids or like they can't have a disagreement with their spouse or their partner in front of their kids. I'm not saying you need to have like, you know, brawls in front of your children. Like please don't do that. But like it's healthy for them to see that rupture is a part of our everyday life. And that as long as we work to repair, that actually is what builds resilience within children. So don't be afraid to mess up. It's just more so again, the aftermath. Like how do you come back and make it better? Yeah. I mean a theme in so much of what you're talking about is not actually avoiding the negatives and the feelings and the ugly and really learning how to deal with it. Yeah. Feel it. Yeah. Process it. Apologize for it. Whatever you need to do. So I think that that's such a common misconception about this kind of work is that it needs to just be all positivity. Yeah. That's really not the case. So thank you for making that so far. Yeah. That's like, yeah, that is that is one of the like the things out there that I'm just like it's not about being calm and happy all the time. So you mentioned your book, Body First Healing. Yeah. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about that where they can get it and also where they can find you on social websites, all the places. Yeah. Yeah. So my book is a Body First Healing. It's a somatic roadmap to healing trauma and healing the nervous system. And it really takes you deep into the work of somatic experiencing, but it blends in some of the other modalities that I mentioned. It's more of a prescriptive book. So it's like, you know, it's it is a roadmap. You get a lot of science. You got a lot of tangible tools, but it's broken up into two parts. So the first part of the book is a lot of that science, the psycho education, and it's so fascinating to learn about your nervous system and your body and trauma. And you just learn so much. And then the second half of the book is the roadmap for the experiential part. So part one is education, part two is experiential. So there's a lot of somatic practices. And then my story is kind of weaved in through the book because I didn't want it to just be a science book. I think that when you put a face to the topics that you're talking about, it just resonates more. Of course. So yeah, that's that's the book. And then people can learn more about either working with me, either as a client or training to become a practitioner in this work or the upcoming retreats or events that we have or podcasts, body for healing podcasts. All that can be found at bodyfirsthealing.com. And your Instagram handle. Yeah, Instagram is heal with Brit with two teas. You recommend that someone asking for a friend starts reading your book or with the program. I think the book is a really great place to start. Okay, actually, yeah, I find yeah, to dip your toes in and people often, you know, we'll read the book and find that provides so much support. And then some people take it further and then come into the program and then take it further and then go into the training. I mean, I've had people who've been on every step of the way, which I think is really, really cool. Yeah, also probably nice to enter the program with an understanding of the terms and the language and the modalities. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you. Great. I could talk to you all day. I know. And by the way, I'm going to take you up. Let's do a second episode because I want to talk about the toxic relationship piece. Yes. Because I feel like we didn't even get to go there. Oh my gosh. There's so much to talk about. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you liked it and want to support this beautiful growing community, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes such a long way. And for more of this content, you can also head to our Instagram @TheWellnessProcessPod. Follow along and send in any questions and topics you'd like me to cover. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next week. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.