THE ACCRESCENT™ PODCAST EPISODE 193

Ep. 193 FINAL

[00:00:00] Hello, welcome back to the Crescent Podcast. I’m your host, Leigh Ann Lindsey. We have a phenomenal guest on the show and in the community today. Britt Piper, there is so much I could say about this conversation and I need to already slow myself down so I don’t get ahead of myself because this was such an aligned, authentic enlivening conversation with her.

But let me start with her bio so we can all kind of wrap our heads around how amazing Britt is. And then I do wanna point out some of my favorite highlights from our conversation before we actually get to the interview. Brittany Piper is an internationally renowned speaker, author, somatic experiencing practitioner and expert in sexual violence prevention and trauma-informed care.

Over the past 13 years, she has delivered more than 400 programs across three continents. Her work has been recognized by the US Army, [00:01:00] the Department of Justice, the Laura Bush Institute for Women’s Health, cosmopolitan Elite Daily, and others as a rape survivor and leading advocate on sexual violence prevention.

Brittany speaks to tens of thousands each year. She’s also a forensic neurobiology expert conducting trauma-informed trainings with the US Army and Sex Crimes detectives, creator of @HealWithBritt on social media and founder of the Internationally Acclaimed Body First Healing Program, Brittany continues to inspire and lead in the field of trauma recovery.

And her new book, body First Healing just came out this year, I think in March, so it’s only been out for a few months, which is another piece that we talk about why that book was so important for her to write. One of the reasons I loved this conversation with Britt is we talk about, we talk about somatics somatic [00:02:00] experiencing specifically, but why body work is such a foundational piece of the puzzle when it comes to trauma recovery.

I think I even talk about how in the work I do with clients, I’m focused very much on more of the unconscious piece of healing, specifically related to narratives, emotions, and I use somatic experiencing techniques in my flow. But I wouldn’t say that I’m a body based healing modality like. Somatic experiencing or myofascial work, and we talk about how that is, you know, distinct and a very, very important piece of the puzzle that is worth looking into for anyone working on healing from trauma, I.

But I love that we get into a lot of nuance. We talk about how there are kind of some of these very, I think, limiting narratives in social media, especially around the nervous system that make us feel like, you know, we just can’t ever be dysregulated and being [00:03:00] dysregulated is bad. And we always have to be regulating our nervous system and you know, making sure our kids are always regulated.

And I think we bring a lot of nuance to that conversation. Brit is so kind to share some of her personal story of what led her to somatic experiencing. And we do start with just what is somatic experiencing? How is that different from other body based modalities? And then something I wanted to say here in the intro, because we don’t get to it until the very, very end, but I feel like it’s a really important part of the conversation, is I wanted to get Britt’s opinion on, I.

Surgery and how surgery can be very traumatic to the mind, body, and spirit. Especially because I work with so many individuals experiencing cancer, surgery is often a part of that journey and how even though we are sedated during surgery, how it can still be oftentimes very invasive but also traumatic.

And so she gives a number of [00:04:00] very specific things you can do to prepare your mind, body, and spirit for surgery to have, you know, so that it’s the least impactful on the mind, body, and spirit as possible. And I found that super, super helpful and that already those have been tips that I’ve shared with current clients who are actively preparing for an upcoming surgery.

So make sure you stay to the end to listen to that piece as well. Thank you so much, Brit, for coming on. I really, really, this is probably one of my favorite conversations I’ve had. In a long, long time. It was such an honor to have her on and I hope, I know you guys will absolutely love this conversation, so please enjoy Britt Piper.

Well, Britt, welcome to the Accrescent Podcast and the Accrescent community. It’s so great to have you here today. Thank you. I am excited to be here. So I, I know you’re doing so much of these conversations for your new book, which I [00:05:00] cannot wait to dive into. I do think it’s so helpful though, as an avid podcast listener myself when I hear someone for the first time to get just a little bit of their background and their story, even though I’m sure you’ve been sharing this so much right now, but a little bit of what, what led you to somatics, what led you to somatic experiencing, and then we’ll start to dive more into, I think, kind of the nitty gritty of what is it and how we practice and all these different things.

Yeah, absolutely. So I. I think like a lot of people who come into this work, I started with my own personal experience. That’s really what led me here. And so much of the way that I show up today as a somatic experiencing practitioner is first and foremost through the lens of an individual who’s experienced trauma, hardship, and recovery through a somatic lens.

And it really did change my life. Um, so I always like to say that it started off as me search and then it turned it into professional research, but [00:06:00] mm-hmm. Yeah. So in my late teens and early twenties, I had experienced, um, a couple of different shock traumas, acute traumas is what we would call them. I had lost my brother in a car accident in high school, and then when I was 20, I was sexually assaulted by a stranger who helped me change my flat tire And my way of.

Healing or my path to recovery was not the prettiest, it was actually pretty destructive. And, um, and it ended, I ended up in some pretty, uh, ugly situations in life. I ended up in a jail cell. I ended up in a hospital bed with alcohol poisoning. And I had been in and out of traditional recovery, you know, talk, talk therapy for many years.

And I found that it was supportive and it provided temporary relief, but it didn’t provide me like resolution. Mm-hmm. I felt like I was just kind of on this hamster wheel. And every year it’s like, what’s gonna [00:07:00] happen this year in my life? How am I gonna implode my life even more? So I was struggling with alcohol abuse, pill dependence, um, suicidal ideation, extreme eating disorder, and I even found myself.

After my assault in a pretty abusive relationship with which now that I work in the space, I do a lot of sexual violence prevention and recovery work. Um, we could have a whole podcast about that, but what I realized and what I experienced, I guess I could say was this somatic experience. So when I ended up in jail, I’ll maybe give some further context here.

Um, I was out one night, so my sexual assault happened when I was 20 and then I had to go through, it was essentially like a two year trial process and it was pretty re-traumatizing. And during that process, I was at the lowest point in my life and. I [00:08:00] think I thought all along that if my perpetrator gets convicted and sentenced, I’ll go back to normal things will be okay.

And that certainly did not happen. And in fact, I got worse after he was sentenced. He was sentenced to 60 years behind bars. But after the sentencing, it was less than a month later that I found myself in a jail cell because of an alcohol related incident. Mm-hmm. So my, I was out one night with my boyfriend who was drinking and driving, and I always say that should give a really good indication of where I was at at the time in my life.

Um, and he was pulled over and arrested. And when the police officers went to pull me out of the car just to give me a ride home in my impaired state, I had a flashback of the night of my assault of a man touching me in a car. And so my body and my nervous system went back into a trauma reenactment without my mind’s control.

And I went into fight mode and I ended up in a jail cell with two counts of battery on [00:09:00] an officer, and it was in that jail cell. I actually went through the whole processing. I was in jail for a couple of days ’cause my parents didn’t wanna bail me out as a way to, as a way to teach me a lesson. Mm. I always say that that was my concrete bottom, which I talk about in in my book.

That was the place in a six by eight cell where I was forced to really confront or sit with kind of the decades old grief and trauma that I had pushed away for so long. There wasn’t alcohol, there wasn’t pills, there wasn’t this really crappy relationship to distract me. From what I hadn’t yet processed.

And so in that jail cell, my body went through intense cycles of what we call discharge or releasing, intense crying, shaking, sweating, trembling. And I remember leaving that jail cell and that experience feeling very different in my body. I felt lighter. It’s like I had [00:10:00] clarity and it’s like I could, like, I could breathe.

Like there was a sense of freedom that I had. And I remember going to my therapist the following week and, you know, disclosing this to her, I feel different in my body, what happened? And she said, I wonder if maybe you should start working with a somatic therapist as well. And I was like, Soma, what? What is somatic?

Um, which I now know is. Therapist who works through the body to heal the imprints of trauma. And so it didn’t take long, it took less than a year really for a lot of my symptoms to start to, um, you know, decrease and then over time completely disappear. I was able to get off of medications, I was able to leave really toxic relationships.

Everything about my life kind of changed and so. That really opened the door for me of like, what is happening here? Like, what is this work? And then I learned that somatic therapy has really been around for quite some time. It just hadn’t hit the mainstream yet. And I know we’re now there, it’s now [00:11:00] becoming much more prevalent and people are certainly leaning into the work more and finding incredible support through it.

Um, so yeah, now for the past, I’d say 14 years, I’ve been pouring myself into the work and become, became a, a student and, you know, in the, the space learning as much as I could, soaking it up like a sponge and now I help others kind of on that same path. Yeah. It’s so beautiful. And again, we’ll we’re gonna dive more into your book, but I think thank you so much for sharing some of that.

I think it will resonate a lot and there’s some pieces of that. That I’d love to talk about a little bit more. You know, parts of it being somatic work, whatever that might entail doesn’t, isn’t just for if you’ve had a physical trauma to your body. Yep. And I think sometimes people might think of that I was in a car accident, I had, there was sexual abuse or a sexual assault, emotional trauma in general.

It can be so good for which I think is kind of something worth pointing out. But [00:12:00] I do think to start, can we talk about what, what is somatic work? Because from what I understand a bit, that is a really broad umbrella that any number of things can come beneath. Yeah. And it’s not that there’s a right or wrong, I think it’s more about, for me, it’s all about education and educating my clients of, Hey, there’s myofascial work, there’s, you know, somatic experiencing, there’s any, there’s any number of different things under this big umbrella.

And I can probably tell, because I know you, which one might be a good place to start, but also there’s some experimenting we’re gonna have to do here to find the ones that really resonate with you. But yes. Can you speak more to that about somatics and then maybe some of the pieces that are beneath it?

Yes, absolutely. So somatic really just means of the body or body based. So technically anyone who is a somatic practitioner, they can hold a different a, a vast array of titles. [00:13:00] Mm-hmm. I’ve worked with people who are somatic work facilitators who are somatic. Experiencing practitioners like me. Um, some would say that EMDR is a somatic form of therapy.

So somatics really just means anything that involves the lens of the body mm-hmm. Where we’re not working so much with cognition, which is like a top down approach. We’re working with the bottom up approach, which is more so the felt sense of the body impulse, the body itself, um, you know, emotions. Um, so yeah, that’s kind of the umbrella of somatics.

And then what I’m specifically trained in is, um, or what I would say is the bread and butter of what I do is somatic experiencing, um, which is a trauma resolution modality where we heal the imprints of trauma, um, through the body. Now, somatic experiencing itself is a trauma resolution modality. But just because someone has the word somatics doesn’t mean that they are trained to treat [00:14:00] or work with mm-hmm.

Trauma. Mm-hmm. And so I think that’s also really important too, um, is that there are a lot of somatic professionals out there, but they’re not trained maybe specifically in the treatment. Of trauma or resolution of trauma, like SC is, I mean, somatic experiencing, it’s like going back to school. It’s a three year program.

Mm-hmm. A lot of in-person hours. It’s a lot of hours that you spend with other practitioners. And dyads and triads. You have consults. There’s a lot that goes into it, but that’s because we are working directly with trauma. Mm-hmm. We’re not just aware that trauma is in the room with us. Yeah. Which, it’s so funny because to me, I’m getting my PhD in depth psychology and I have colleagues and cohort members who, um, come from all different walks of life.

And some of them will talk about, you know, oh, A DHD, I’m, I’m starting to be curious that if it might be connected to trauma. And for me, I actually, I’ve never been trained in conventional psychology. I purposefully avoided that, [00:15:00] uh, because of the limitations. I think it comes with in, in some ways, and that’s not to say that it can’t be life changing and life saving for people.

In the right place in time. But all that being said, to me, it’s sort of like everyone should be trauma informed. Everyone should be trained in trauma because I think on some level, and maybe this can lead us to defining trauma a little bit more, since this is a word that’s thrown around a lot more than it used to be.

Yeah. But to me, that I’ve never, I’ve never worked with a cancer patient who didn’t have trauma. I’ve never worked with someone with chronic illness who didn’t have trauma that needed further. I use the word tending a lot versus releasing or even processing. Its tending those parts, those past selves, those imprints on the psyche.

Yep. And so I just, even as you’re saying like there can be somatic people, there can be therapists who aren’t trained in trauma. To me still, that’s sort of like a, there’s gotta be a day coming [00:16:00] where that’s just blanketly involved in the training for everyone. Sure. Yeah. And I, you know, that’s where a lot of my work started was, um, before I even got into the somatic work, I actually was doing, you know, as a professional myself, I was doing a lot of trauma informed trainings on college campuses and.

It’s a lot of what I still do to today. Um, but now I do forensic neurobiology trainings for like the military and violent crimes and first responders. And again, what I’m providing is trauma informed awareness and science and neurology that helps them to understand how trauma impacts not just a human, but also systems and how it impacts investigative procedures.

Like trauma is not just stored in the explicit memory and a victim when you’re working with them in an interrogation process. I’m using air quotes here. My gosh. When you’re [00:17:00] interrogating a victim, they’re likely not gonna be able to recall explicit memory, but they can recall implicit or body memory.

Mm-hmm. Like even just these basic things. They’re not being practiced in our systems today, whether it’s in education. I feel that all teachers should be trauma informed. Right. How does, how does trauma show up in a child’s behavior when they’re in class and they have a hard time paying attention or they’re disruptive?

Um, yeah. We could talk, we could have an entire podcast about that, but I, I do think that a trauma informed world is what people are really aiming for now. Um, you know, and even like reentry programs, I worked for a short time with the Rhode Island Department of Corrections. I was helping them to create a reentry program that focused on healing because so many of their violent offenders and most violent offenders, um, have some kind of adverse childhood experience.

Hmm. Trauma. And [00:18:00] rather than just teaching them, this is how you fill out a resume, this is how you’re gonna start to pay bills when you reenter into society. We also have to get to the root of it and recognize that these are hurt people who’ve been hurting people. Mm-hmm. And you’re just putting them back out into a population.

Right. But they’re still kind of the same person. So again, yeah. Trauma informed care, whether it’s in education, whether it’s in, you would think in our normal healing therapy, counseling services, that would be like number one. But there’s a lot of, um, you know, conventional therapy where there’s not trauma informed trainings that are done for therapists.

Completely. Yeah. Yeah. Right. No, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve had therapists say, and again, because I depth psychology is, I like to call it holistic psychology. It’s mind, body, spirit. It’s all about the unconscious, the psyche, the collective unconscious. So I, but I wasn’t trained traditionally. I’ve [00:19:00] never taken psychology before this.

So when the first therapist I heard said, oh, I don’t work with trauma, I was like. I couldn’t, I couldn’t separate those two. That just made no sense to me. I was like, how can you be in therapy and not work with trauma? Like, what are we doing? So it just, it didn’t even click. I didn’t understand that that was even an option.

Yeah. In, in that space. It was very interesting for me. Yeah. But to that end, I would really love to hear your 2 cents on. What is trauma? Because I have a lot of cancer patients come to me and go, you know, my childhood was idyllic. There wasn’t anything that happened. And I think we are sort of taught, oftentimes it’s big T trauma, little T trauma.

And when I start working with individuals, often there is what might really be labeled Big T, little T. But for me, I see it so much differently as it really, it, it doesn’t matter how big or small, how ordinary or non-ordinary it doesn’t need to be. You know, these patients come to me and they’re like, [00:20:00] well, I wasn’t abused, I wasn’t this.

And then we start really talking and we go, oh, but there was this time when I was 10 and this thing happened and it just created such a rupture in their psyche. Even though from the outside looking in, no one would probably label that as trauma. Yeah. Yes. I have a lot to say about this. So carried away.

Cut me off. Okay. Yeah. First, I’ll start with my definition of trauma, and then we can kind of go into the, the nuances of all of it. But the best definition that I’ve heard of trauma that I’ve gathered from all of the modalities that I’m trained in is that trauma is any experience that overwhelms the nervous systems capacity to cope.

And when this happens, the nervous system can get stuck in a stress response cycle, but more specifically, we get stuck in survival mode and we can get stuck in the states. The survival states that the [00:21:00] nervous system enlisted in order to survive. And so of course there’s a physiological component to that, but there’s also an emotional, mental, you know, psychosomatic component to that.

Um, but it’s any experience in the SE world, we say SE stands for somatic experiencing. I. In the SE world, we say it’s any experience that feels like too much, too fast, too soon, or not enough for your nervous system to cope with. Mm-hmm. And that means though, that trauma is relative because what might feel like too much, too fast, too soon to one nervous system is not gonna feel like too much, too fast, too soon to another nervous system.

Mm-hmm. And so trauma we find is not so much found in the event, it’s found in the nervous system. And the way that we work with that in our practice is we help the nervous system to come out of survival [00:22:00] mode and we start to build a new foundation of safety. So I love to use analogies just as a way to like help it make sense?

Mm-hmm. Um, a good analogy that I love to use is the security system. Your nervous system is like the security system of your life. And it’s always scanning. We call this neuroception. It’s scanning for two things. Am I safe? Am I not safe? Am I safe? Am I not safe? And when the nervous system gets overwhelmed and gets stuck in dysregulation or survival mode, you can kind of imagine it’s like your security system is faulty.

Like it’s always alarming for danger, even if it might not be there or it might not be alarming for danger even though it is there. Mm-hmm. And so what we do in se is we help people to first notice that there are things that are safe in your environment. Like something as simple as these rocks that are on my desk right here.

Um, I can take some time to just notice them through my sensory [00:23:00] motor system and just notice the grooves and the weight of them and the texture and the color. And as I do this, it’s sending signals to my subconscious brain and my nervous system that. Oh, this feels safe. And as I did that, I just noticed my stomach, my, my stomach, my, which is a sign of rest and digest.

That is so funny. So it turns down the alarm of the nervous system. So, um, Peter Levine, he’s the developer of Somatic Experiencing, he has a wonderful quote that says that trauma is like an internal straight jacket, which is the nervous system moment becomes frozen in time. And so it’s like our brain knows, this is why just working with cognition isn’t always super helpful.

Our brain knows that that experience is over, but our nervous system hasn’t caught up yet. Mm-hmm. So we help the nervous system catch up. Now when you talk about Big T and Little T Trauma. [00:24:00] That’s actually something I touch on a bit in the book and I share that I’m not a big fan of Big T and little T because what can feel, yeah, what can feel like a big T trauma to one person can feel like a little T trauma to another person.

And in the book, I use the example of two young boys who live in the same neighborhood. They’re neighbors. One boy comes from an environment where it doesn’t feel super safe, where the parents aren’t really attuned, where maybe there’s a lot of chaos or one parent is missing and not in the home. The other child comes from an environment where he feels safe, he feels attuned to, there’s a lot of nurturing, there’s a lot of healthy emotional expression, and it feels like a regulated environment.

These two boys go to school one day and they get bullied in the same way, so they’re now in their survival responses and then they come home. And one child comes home to a home where the one parent is gone and the one parent that is there is passed out on the couch ’cause they’ve been drinking. And when he goes to wake [00:25:00] them up, they scream at him and they say, go deal with it yourself.

And so he stays armored up. He retreats into his room where this now feels like trauma to his nervous system. The other young boy goes home and he’s able to co-regulate in an environment that feels safe. He’s able to express what has happened. He’s able to move through that stress response cycle. His parents are able to soothe and regulate him, and then tell him, we’re gonna go to the school tomorrow and talk to the principal.

And this is never happen again. So for him, that might just feel like a blip in the radar. For the other child, it could feel like trauma. And so again, it’s less about comparing what’s big, what’s not big. And also, as you mentioned earlier. It’s not just physical trauma. And for the most part, what shows up in my practice is the emotional trauma.

Mm-hmm. Um, and my experience with this, even personally, you know, it’s interesting, and this is often the journey that a lot of clients come to me with, is they come to me with symptoms or [00:26:00] they come to me with a trauma, a, a more acute shock, shock trauma that’s happened. Event or the symptoms, or a little bit of both.

Mm-hmm. Exactly. And they know that there’s work to be done, healing to be done. And then we get deeper into the work and we’re like, oh. There’s other stuff here from our formative years mm-hmm. That is actually at the root of this. And when you look at the studies, for instance, of soldiers who have PTSD compared to soldiers who don’t come home, same experience.

And they don’t have PTSD. The soldiers that come home with PTSD, same experience are the ones who had adverse childhood experiences. And that’s because they didn’t grow in an environment, they weren’t planted in an environment that allowed their nervous system to thrive and grow into this resilient system that could move through and not get overwhelmed by experiences that are stressful or mm-hmm.

And so that was my experience. I went into therapy [00:27:00] with, I experienced an assault, I experienced a loss of my brother, and then as we got deeper, I realized. Oh wait, that birth trauma that my mom told me about that we don’t really talk about, like when I was taken from my mom at birth, because there was methamphetamine in our system, I was put into foster care for three months.

That actually is the root of all of this. Mm-hmm. Talking about it, I’m feeling emotional. Um, and then when you go beyond that, then there’s the intergenerational stuff of Oh yeah, there’s what my mom experienced. Oh, wait, there’s what my grandmother experienced. Oh wait, there’s what my great-grandmother experienced, which is something I also explore in my book.

I interviewed the women in my lineage. Mm. And I saw the patterns, not just the patterns of behaviors, the narratives, the narratives, the patterns of symptoms that were the same. Um, so yeah, like I said, I could talk about this. In depth. Uh, it’s so fascinating [00:28:00] to me. But trauma is not just what directly happens to you.

It’s not just an event with a single, you know, short, beginning, middle, and end. It’s also, they can be these experiences that over time feel chronic, that kind radar. Mm-hmm. Um, they can also be passed down for any longtime listeners or followers on Instagram. You guys will know that I have loved and used herbal face food for probably over five years now.

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Oh yes. Generational trauma, birth trauma. These are all things that come up in my practice at some point, especially, especially when, because I mainly work with cancer and chronic [00:30:00] illness. Mm-hmm. What I have seen, and this is actually what my dissertation is gonna be on, is there’s such clear patterns with each type of cancer mm-hmm.

That I can, if someone comes in with breast cancer, I could guess five things. They’ve experienced five narratives in their unconscious that they’re holding onto five patterns in their present day life without ever even talking to them. And it’d probably be pretty accurate. So it’s, you know, this is what I get so passionate about is, you know, the emotional connections to illness and how, particularly with cancer and chronic illness, trauma work needs to be a part of the conventional medicine treatment plan.

Yep. It’s not, it’s, it’s really, you know, uh, chemo, radiation, surgery, maybe some drugs and that’s it. Yeah. And then I, I’m working with clients and they have a whole care team. ’cause most people coming to me are having a more integrative team with lots of different team members. And I’m just a piece of that.

But we are seeing patients whose tumors [00:31:00] shrink by 50% in one month mm-hmm. From doing this much, much deeper healing work. So I just, I get really, I get lit up like you do about, like, this is so important. This must be, and that’s my dream long term is to one day work. So that trauma care is a part of the cancer.

The conventional cancer protocol. Yeah. And I, I mean, I will say I was really excited when I learned that we were gonna be speaking because, um, I share in my book how, you know, my mom and I have had a rough, rough journey over the years and writing this book was a very difficult experience for the two of us.

’cause it meant sharing parts of her story that she had never shared before. Hmm. Of my story. And so it’s been an un uh, an uncoupling of a lot of that. And it’s been difficult dialogues that I feel like have actually brought us much closer. But, um, she was diagnosed with breast cancer back in, I think it was 2021, [00:32:00] uh, uh, maybe 2020.

And, um, and that’s a part of this book too. I, I share about that. And so when I learned that we were gonna talk, I was like, yes, this is like right up my alley because yeah, there’s absolutely a correlation. You know, she started to, she didn’t go the conventional route. She has not done chemo. Um, she’s not in remission.

She’s going more of the alternative route. Mm-hmm. And, but she heard from all of her, you know, all of her doctors that she talked to when they heard her trauma history, which I was really glad to hear that they asked those questions. They recommended you should start seeing a therapist because your body is holding onto a lot of chronic stress and trauma that’s unresolved.

Mm-hmm. So I’m really appreciative and grateful that she has found people that have been helping her in that regard, because yeah, it can be really difficult on the other end. Oh my gosh. Well, and I’m, that’s lucky. ’cause that’s not what I hear from most patients. Yeah. And you know, maybe, maybe their oncologist will say something like, [00:33:00] Hey, this is, this could be pretty stressful.

You might wanna find a therapist to help you through the journey. Yes. Which can be wonderfully impactful. But we, we need to go so much deeper than that. And because I’m in the depth psychology world, it’s so much deeper than just. Cognition, right? Yes. Dealing with the unconscious and the beliefs that are there.

It’s not rational, it’s not intellectual. A lot of it is felt sense, and I bring a lot of somatic imagery and work into this unconscious processing. So I, I love that. And I think there just, there is a big distinguishing factor between therapy to get me through the treatments, which absolutely can be supportive versus that much, much deeper tending and healing.

And really it’s what, what is my mind, body, and spirit trying to tell me? I always say cancer is, cancer is the mind, body and spirit saying I cannot continue in this way anymore. Mm-hmm. And what is it that it can’t continue to live in or carry or believe? Yes. So yes, I could go [00:34:00] all day long on this, but to that end, that end, I think that’s actually a really good segue because I would love, love, love to hear from you on this.

The physiological cascade that can happen. Yeah. Right. This is something that I, I understand a fair bit, but I want to be able to understand so much more and communicate. ’cause it gets thrown around, you know, emotions can cause illness and still it’s sort of vague. How, yeah. It’s not always a direct effect.

It’s more like a cascade that I think then slowly happens and builds over time. But what does that look like? Trauma is an experience where my nervous system is overwhelmed. Mm-hmm. Boom. That’s the initiating. Then what happens? Where does that start to ripple out into the rest of the body over days and weeks and years?

Absolutely. Yeah. So, fantastic question. So when you experience. Trauma or let’s just stick with stress. Okay? When there is something in your life that feels stressful, your nervous system will go into what we call [00:35:00] activation. Okay? So, um, again, that security system, it’s like alarm. Alarm. And when this happens, there’s a number of things that occur, but from a hormonal standpoint, adrenaline and cortisol get released into the body.

And adrenaline and cortisol are what we know as our stress hormones, or we call them our survival hormones. An adrenaline and cortisol, they mobilize your body to fight or flee. Think of it like a pressure cooker. Okay? We just got filled up. Our pressure cooker just got filled up with all these stress hormones.

Now, if we are not able to fight or flee physically. Or from an emotional standpoint, we don’t allow ourselves to be with the healthy anger, which women are? We, we will talk about silent, you know, um, self silencing and what women, what women often do. We suppress or push down our anger, or we suppress or push down our flight, the emotional charge, the adrenaline cortisol flight, which is fear, right?

Oh, [00:36:00] no, I can’t be anxious. I need to calm down. Mm-hmm. I need to calm down my anger, I need to calm down. I can’t be too dramatic, I can’t be too loud. So we suppress, we hold down the lid of that pressure cooker. Then what happens is that stress over time turns into chronic stress within the body. And the nervous system and survival becomes priority number one.

So all of our other working systems, essentially, you can think of it like they get turned down, the volume dial gets turned down. Our endocrine system, our reproductive system, our immune system, our um, digestive system, our cardiovascular system, all of the 11 organ systems in the body get turned down. And over time, this creates inflammation in the body, which can then create disease.

So we often say in the SE space that your body is no longer in a state of ease and rest and digest or those [00:37:00] moments of rest and digest. Your, your body is now in a place of dis-ease, which over time, that chronic tension and inflammation and stress can then create disease. Mm-hmm. Um, another thing I kind of wanna give is just like a quick little analogy.

Is, think of your nervous system like a ladder. So I also am trained in polyvagal theory, which is like the upgraded science of the nervous system. Um, and at the Polyvagal Institute we use this wonderful analogy of a ladder to illustrate the nervous system. And this ladder has three sections. So at the very top is rest and digest.

That’s what we call your ventral vagal state. And the middle of the ladder is your sympathetic state of fight or flight. And at the bottom of the ladder is your parasympathetic state of dorsal. This is your dorsal vagal state, otherwise known as shutdown. It’s kind of like Arun State, but not exactly. So most people would assume that having a regulated or a [00:38:00] resilient or a healthy nervous system is being at the top of that ladder all day long.

A healthy nervous system or a natural bio rhythm goes up and down that ladder roughly 100 times a day. Mm-hmm. Which means, you know, we come down that ladder, oh, here’s the adrenaline and cortisol, and if we’re suppressing it, oh, we’re pushing it down. But dysregulation is when we have a rigid or a fixed nervous system that’s stuck down in those two bottom sections of the ladder.

A healthy nervous system is one that’s flexible, that can move in and out of activation or through that stress response cycle without getting stuck. Mm-hmm. A lot of that is learned in our earliest years. Um, so yeah, that’s kind of the, the physiology behind it. And yeah, the, the numbers and the research absolutely points to, you know, when we have emotional suppression or when we have unresolved trauma, emotional trauma.

Um, that leads to higher rates of chronic illness disease. Um, you know, what I [00:39:00] see a lot in my practice is digestive issues. Fibromyalgia, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, migraines, DMJ. These are kind of the somatic imprints of trauma that, over time has created this wear and tear on the body.

Mm-hmm. Where, what I, what I theorize, and this would be really fascinating to study one day, is why does. Why does cancer for someone go to one organ versus another? My theory is, you know, if it went to their lungs, it’s because grief had already weakened that part of the body. That was the weakest part of the body where the cancer could take root and have kind of the least fight if it goes to the thyroid, if it goes to the ovaries.

That’s my theory, and for me, that goes back to the trauma history and the trauma patterns. Yes. And where a lot of that comes in. Why does so many of these diseases, right? Even autoimmune at their root, are all just inflammatory diseases. So why did this chronic [00:40:00] inflammation affect. My thyroid versus for you, it’s affecting your nervous system or your brain or whatever.

Mm-hmm. That for me, I think in my theory, goes back to the emotional root causes. No, it, it absolutely does. And, um, that’s part of the se, se framework actually. You’d be a great commissioner. Yes. That’s part of the work that we do too. And I would say that people who take that even fur even further is probably the people in the, um, you know, biodynamic, craniosacral therapy.

Um. Which I would love to study next, but, um, each of the organs, the, the viscera in the body certainly hold different commo components or emotional charges. So, for instance, like the liver is often represented by anger, right? The adrenals is chronic stress. The gut and the enteric nervous system is usually terror, fear, anxiety, um, heart can often be tied back to attachment, connection, and love.

When we have TMJ [00:41:00] jaw or low migraines, that’s usually because there is suppressed. Um, boundaries suppressed anger. Um, so all of these, there’s usually a pattern that leads back to some kind of emotional trauma or emotional wounding that took place because different organs and viscera in the body hold different components and help the body process the charge of those experiences.

So, um, your theory is absolutely correct. That’s, that’s nice to hear. Yeah. Yeah. That’s something we actually, we focus on quite a bit in our, in our work. Wow. Yeah. I think that’s so profound. Oh my gosh. There’s so many pieces I want to get to with this. Ruth, you Yeah, I do really wanna talk, I wanna get to cancer patients preparing the body for surgery after surgery.

I can see those being very, very traumatic. But I do wanna just talk ever so briefly about, I think this is really important because I see on social media a lot of. [00:42:00] What I would call overdependence on nervous system regulation. Yes. Where we’re I? My worry is we are not creating more resilient people. Yeah.

And the narratives around, I’m experiencing a discomfort, I’m experiencing dysregulation. I need to immediately get myself back into regulation as quickly as possible, and then I’ve done a good job and I can move on. And again, in my work, it’s so much more. I, I see emotions and dysregulation as, oh, there’s a inner self.

There’s an inner Leigh Ann who just got really angry. Yes. She deserves a seat at the table. Yeah. She deserves a voice. And to be heard and to be tended to not immediately shut down. Yes, absolutely. Can you, so can you speak to this a little bit? ’cause it’s also we’re not saying, and we need to create environments and childhood where there’s never any trauma and there’s never any adverse experiences.

I think that we’re almost seeing that starting to happen and creating less and [00:43:00] less resilient people. So it’s people who not, you know, I’m not a parent who never does anything wrong with my child, but I’m equipping my child with the tools to be able to have an adverse experience and then repair and regulate really quickly.

Yeah, no. So, um, oh, I. Yeah, I can talk about this a lot too. Um, yeah, you know, it’s, it’s interesting because I think for so long people in the somatic or the nervous system space, we just wanted people in the psychology realm to understand that there is a mind, body, spirit connection and that the body cannot be left out.

But, you know, we are, as humans, we are very extreme creatures, so we often swing from one side of the pendulum to the other. And so I feel like what’s happening now is that there’s almost this over oversimplification or over, you know, on nervous system regulation as the end all be all. And there’s also a lot of [00:44:00] misconceptions out there that regulation means being calm, cool, and collected all the time.

Mm-hmm. I had to write an entire chapter on my book about misconceptions because it’s, it’s exciting that we’re talking about it, but it also, again, it has to, we have to talk about it from a place of. True informed information and education, not just what we see on social media. And so, um, I will say that when people, so what I’m seeing a lot, for instance, people love the somatic tools, right?

Somatic tools, people love it. Um, how can I get out anger. You can do air screams or you can do fist clinches. You can do heel drops. These are things that we in employ, in the somatic experiencing space, but only sparingly, only in moments where we need a little extra support. If you were to sit with me through a somatic experiencing session, I often will not use those tools.

They’re just there as like homework exercises for clients to use instead. What we wanna [00:45:00] use is what I call the three E’s in the book. So when something like anger, let’s say for instance, comes to the surface, instead of resisting it, pushing it away, or trying to regulate myself out of it, I’m using air quotes.

Mm-hmm. You actually wanna, first, the first E is notice what’s the experience in my body? Yeah. I’m feeling anger, I’m feeling heat, I’m feeling constriction. I’m feeling like, oh, my hands are really sweaty. That’s ’cause the blood motility is going to my limbs, and is that okay for that to be here? My body is having a natural experience too.

Whatever. Probably something that was anchoring. Yeah, exactly. So I noticed the experience. The next thing I’m gonna do is a second E is, is there some, is there a way that my body wants to naturally express this? So maybe it’s a. Or maybe it is, I do just wanna clench my fist. You know, I have a almost 2-year-old, almost five-year-old, and we do, we don’t calm down.

Um, you know, I see a lot of these things in parenting where it’s like, here’s the calm corner. We want our kids to be calm. [00:46:00] And instead, for me, it’s like when my son Noah feels frustrated, I first validated. I’m like, yeah, I’d be frustrated too, bud. How does that feel right now? And he’s like, I just wanna, Ugh.

And he maybe like, you know, stomps his foot and I’m like, yeah, is that okay for that to be here? And what he is doing by allowing that stress response cycle to move through, he’s lifting the lid of that pressure cooker and expressing. Those healthy stress hormones. So it’s experience, expel, express, I’m sorry, and then expel.

And as we express, whether it’s emoting, whether it’s crying, whether it’s, um, it’s not anything we intentionally have to do. It could also just be, oh, I’m sweating right now. Or My body feels like it’s a little trembly. Mm-hmm. That leads to the expelling of adrenaline and cortisol through the body. Mm-hmm.

And so we follow this cycle, um, through, and we’ve learned this through the observation of animals in the wild. That’s where a lot of Peter Levine’s [00:47:00] work started through ethology and this study of animals in the wild, recognizing that they have the same nervous systems as human animals, but they just don’t have this conscious mind that’s always interrupting the emotional expression, what I should do, here’s what I should say, or shouldn’t do, or shouldn’t do, shouldn’t say.

Right. And so animals, if you just look up. Like go right now. Go to Google Animal video discharge and you’ll see that they tremble, they shake. But again, we are very, these modernized creatures where we’re like, Nope, we need to make ourselves small or not do that. So there are small ways this doesn’t look like you have to go hit a pillow or rage scream.

We actually advise against that in the SE world. We’re not big, we don’t, we’re not big proponents of catharsis. ’cause you could take yourself into body memory that your nervous system is not ready for. Mm-hmm. Um, which could do more harm than good. So anyways, all that to say, it’s less about being calm again.

It’s like [00:48:00] when these experiences show up, can we just make room for the experience? And what I’m finding is that people are skipping the first E and they’re going straight to, oh, I have anger. What can I do to get it out a hundred percent? And when you’re doing that, you’re not doing what we. Really aim to do an SE work, which is grow your capacity to be with that activation.

It’s not that the anger is too big, it’s that your capacity right now to be with it is too small. I hear the thunder. Perfect timing with our anger talk. Yeah. The only way to grow your container or your capacity to be with the anger is to gently touch into it in a way that feels tolerable. And as you’re doing this, what you’re doing is you’re showing your body and your subconscious mind and your nervous system that, oh, it’s safe for me to be with a moment of anger.

I’m not gonna get disciplined. I’m not gonna get shut down like I was in [00:49:00] childhood. I can touch into it, I can feel it, and then my body knows how to touch back out. Mm-hmm. So that’s really important in the work. ’cause it’s not just like jumping to the straight thing, you know the first thing because what you’re doing is.

In somatic experiencing, again, Soma means of the body. We are helping you to better be with the experience of your body. Mm-hmm. Good and bad. But if you are just jumping to the straight tool, the the first fix that you can use to get it out. You’re actually not being in your body. You’re getting outta your body.

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Check the show notes for a discount code for 30% off your first order. Right. Well, it’s another form of [00:51:00] emotional bypass. Exactly. And, and for me, again, like my lens is so much of the inner self, the psyche, the unconscious, the inner parts, that part just got completely dismissed. It’s like, it’s like if your, you know, son Noah came up to you and was like.

I’m so, you know, I’m so hurt. This kid at school did this thing to me and you’re like, oh, I see you’re hurt. Okay, let’s start tapping our feet and moving our hands. And he’s kinda like, well, hang on. I just, can I talk to you about for it for a second? Yeah. Can you hear me? Can you be with me? And it is funny ’cause that’s usually how we would approach other people in our life.

If, if someone came to you, even in anger, you’d be like, I think most of us. Right? Right. Tell me about it. Talk it out. Yeah. Gosh, that that was a really mean thing for your boss to do. I’m so sorry. You’d help them just be with it. Yeah. You wouldn’t immediately go, oh my God, no, stop. I don’t wanna hear about your anger.

Keep it inside. Don’t tell me about it. You need to just go do a regulation practice before you talk to me. Got it. Yeah. Maybe there’s toxic environments where we need to set boundaries, right. Which is a whole different [00:52:00] conversation, but. I, it’s so funny ’cause I see the exact same thing. People come to work with me and they’re like, okay, I know emotions can be connected to cancer.

Help me release all of this. And I’m like, hold on, let’s rewind. We’re not gonna dive in and go, what anger needs to just be ripped out of your body? We need to go, where is this anger from? What did that past version of me? Or present version? But often it’s a past version, you know, what did that past version of me not get to say or do?

What does she still need to express? What does she still need to be heard? Mm-hmm. Because she’s not gonna be ready to hear us until she has first felt heard. And so, yes, it, it is exactly what you’re saying. I think in this, in this unconscious approach, I take maybe a very somatic approach to the unconscious work of, it’s not about.

Yeah, I, I don’t know. I’m seeing almost like a operation game where they go in and just pluck it out. I think sometimes people think that’s what it is. Just pluck out the anger from me. Pluck out the [00:53:00] fear, then we’ll be good to go. Yeah. So it’s, I often say, um, you know, ’cause my, my book is, it explores mostly somatic experiencing, but what you’re talking about reminds me a lot of internal family system or parts work.

Mm-hmm. Um, which is something else that I’m, I weave into my program. And I think what we get wrong sometimes in the nervous system space without all the other concepts, is that we focus too much on regulation. Without focusing on relation. Mm-hmm. It’s like when this anger shows up or when this feeling shows up, these are just younger parts of us, or these are younger versions of us, and Bessel VanDerKolk, the author of the Body, keeps the score.

He says, trauma doesn’t come back necessarily as a memory, comes back as a reaction. Mm-hmm. These are the younger versions of us that, you know, when someone gives us a certain look and subconsciously we’re rec, we’re not, we don’t recognize it, but subconsciously [00:54:00] it’s like our body is like, oh, that reminds me of the look my mom used to give me when I was in trouble.

And now all of a sudden our visceral is clenching our stomach and our shoulder muscles are collapsing. We’re going into a hide posture. Our eyes go down. And so that’s the reaction. That’s the trauma, that’s the memory. Right. And we work to bring people out of that memory, showing them that they don’t have to be in that anymore.

But it’s more so that when this comes up and it’s like, no, I’m not allowed to do this. I actually need to come out of this posture. It’s not okay. What we do is we war against ourselves and we war against our body. Mm-hmm. And if we just attune and relate to that part of us as, yes, this is a younger part of me that knew exactly what to do at the time, um, that helps, that actually minimizes the stress response.

But when people come in and they’re like, I wanna get rid of the symptom, I wanna get rid of the emotion. These are, it’s our body’s way of communicating to us. And when we war [00:55:00] against the things that are happening internally in the body, that creates more stress. Mm-hmm. And more response cycle, which then just creates more of the symptom or more of the emotion.

Mm-hmm. And so it’s so an attunement of a part of me is feeling anxious right now. I feel that in the, you know, my, my chest closing up, I feel it in the, the, the lump in my throat. But another part of me also feels really grounded and I feel settled in my sit bones. And as I’m recognizing that my body is just experiencing anxiety, I also have, I also recognize that I’m not consumed by it, and it’s not my identity in this moment.

And then I’m gonna be okay. And then the body starts to woo and the adrenaline cortisol starts to go, right? Mm-hmm. So yeah, it’s this, uh, the warring against the body and the quick fixes and the urgency to just get better that often will create more of the conditions that we’re trying to help. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

I could just go on and on and on. I know we’re coming to the end, so I wanna [00:56:00] try and be respectful of your time. I do think I, I really would love to hear from you because I, I work with patients. On all spectrums of it, but often a big part of it is absolutely helping them through the diagnosis on top of doing the deeper healing.

Yeah. But sometimes that’s, they have op, you know, open abdominal surgery on Tuesday and we’re preparing the mind, body, and spirit for that. And then after that experience, we’re metabolizing that experience, mind, body, and spirit. Yeah. And oftentimes there’s kind of, there’s two things I wanna get your input on.

One is, even though we’re sedated, why a surgery can still be very traumatic to the mind, body, and spirit, even though we’re sedated, someone might be like, well, I, I was knocked out, so how could it be a trauma? But also understanding I just had, um, a. OV ovarian cancer patient who had to have an internal radiation procedure that lasted three days.[00:57:00]

The device had to be in her for three days straight. She couldn’t move her body off the bed for three days. She was literally strapped to the bed. Wow. And I just was telling her that’s, that can be very traumatic, not being able to move and express, literally just physically moving your body. So can you give us a little bit of your insight into that, and then if there’s time, what could be some supportive things, either leading into a procedure or a surgery or even after to help the body metabolize some of that?

Yeah, definitely. So yeah, that’s a a question right, that we get a lot is, well, I was, I wasn’t there for the surgery. Right. And that kind of goes back to the difference between explicit memory, which is verbal memory and implicit memory, which is non-verbal memory. So it’s like your brain might not have been there, your hippocampus might not have been there.

Um, but your body was there to remember. And in in [00:58:00] particular, in the se work that we see with, um, you know, like medical trauma or surgery or, or things like that, um, we see this more so with the, the anesthesia, um, versed, which is like, I think the technical term is midaz or I, I think. And so the issue that we see with that is that it has amnesia like qualities, but it’s known as like the forget the surgery drug.

Mm-hmm. Because forget, and that’s because versed more thunder first can erase explicit and implicit memories of the procedure. Okay. And so implicit or body memory is a crucial element though that we explore in the se modality to renegotiate or heal like a potential surgical trauma. Um, so instead, like we opt for local anesthesia shots at the incision site to block pain signals more [00:59:00] effectively, um, and to, you know, meet with your anesthesiologist beforehand to ask about those medications, the methods of administration, you know, expected sensation, side effects, duration, all of those things can be really important to kind of prepare.

Um, but I would say like some things that we, I’ve worked with, with clients who, you know, are going in for, for surgery is we’ll do prep before surgery. So like, if it’s possible, like meet your surgical team mm-hmm. If that’s, and that’s important because it’s a way that your nervous system can co-regulate and establish trust with your surgical team.

Um, you can interview them if you want. You can get to know them. You can just ask, Hey, can you meet for coffee one day, you know, at the hospital. And we just, I call it a coffee and co-regulate. You sit down and you just get to know them. Allow your nervous system to kind of be thought out by theirs. Um, ask questions, you know, to feel safe and informed.

Um, and even I’ve had some clients do this, [01:00:00] asking to hold their hand could actually bring immediate safety to the body beforehand. Hmm. And I’ll say that there are some surgeons who are starting to do this because they recognize that even though a patient might be under the body is still present. And so, um, again, the body senses through electro quantum mechanical Right.

And heart coherence when someone is coming near. Right. So like, even though you might not see someone behind you, you can start to feel them. We call this your peri personal space. So even though you’re not consciously there, your subconscious mind and the body is still taking in. What’s coming, what’s going where you’re being touched, right?

Um, you can also orient to the space. So like if your surgery team is, again, again, it’s gonna be situational, but if they’re open to it, visiting the surgery center beforehand to kind of familiarize or orient your system with the environment can reduce disorientation, which happens with an, with anesthesia and stress.

Um, and again, uh, the, the [01:01:00] whole an anesthesia component. Um, also you can designate an advocate. So like, choose a trustworthy, you know, calm person to accompany you during pre and post surgery. Um, so that you have someone there that feels like a safe anchor. Um, and then also preparing your home life for recovery.

So like rearranging the furniture, setting up resting areas like stocking up on groceries, ensuring there’s someone there to handle like bills, groceries, childcare, pet care. Again, we’re trying to like minimize stress. Um. And avoiding, you know, minimizing stress, like avoiding any activating situations or environments beforehand, right?

Can also be helpful. Um, and then surgery prep itself, and this is what I do with clients, is we will do, um, a surgery rehearsal, right? Mm-hmm. Maybe we do with you, like work with a therapist or an SE practitioner, um, or someone such as yourself to kind of rehearse the actual day, to discharge [01:02:00] the anticipatory fear or anxiety and assess effective, supportive resources.

So like when you think about that pressure cooker, as you go into that rehearsal of like, what’s it gonna look like to walk in there and now visualize this, that pressure cooker is gonna start to fill. And what you can do is you can open the lid with your clients and help that nervous system kind of prepare.

Like, I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I can do it again. Um, in this safe, kind of contained en environment with a, with a therapist. Um, and then altered states, you know, when you go in and out of certain anesthetics, um, you know, practice going in, in and out of an altered state with guidance from like an SEP or a therapist who’s somatically trained.

So like techniques like of this could be like imagining waking from sleep, right? Recalling a moment where, and I know this sounds out there, but recalling a moment recently where you had a couple of glasses of wine and you’re like, can you remember when that, what that foggy felt like? Mm-hmm. Like, use dream imagery or, [01:03:00] um, maybe even hypnosis.

I’ve never done hypnosis, but that was suggested by someone else in the SE world. And what this can do is these practices can help, um, help accept the altered state during and after surgery. Again, rather than resisting it. Um, bring comfort items with you to support the system, engage in laughter and play.

So like, watch funny videos, engage in laughter, um, you know, that can kind of, you know, bring down stress. During the, the procedure, so some people may still have hearing that’s intact under. And so encourage the surgical team, and this is part of the prep with your surgery team. Encourage them to say positive things during the procedure.

Yeah. Requesting that cha that surgical challenges not be discussed with an earshot, or use headphones or earplugs to block the noise. If that’s something you’re not comfortable asking them or they’re not comfortable [01:04:00] doing, you can ask them, can I please wear my, my head plug, you know, my earplugs. And I would say after, um, you know, coming out of this immobility state, okay, um, as the drugs wear off, like you’re gonna start to slowly wake up.

And it’s important to have kind of this safe and quiet environment that doesn’t feel too stimulating. Having your advocate present your comfort items. Um, and having them there for like reassurance and support is crucial. And then lean on your advocate. So like if they’re, they should know like what your procedure looks like when you wake up.

Okay. It’s important to have, um, you know, they should be the ones who know what questions to ask the doctor, and they should be able to help you wake up without pressure. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, that, that should be important too. Um, and then the last thing I would say is maybe just like proactive pain. Um, proactive pain management, um, you know, orient kind of at [01:05:00] your own pace before being moved or discharged.

So like orienting to the environment. Focus on pleasure rather than pain by taking pain medication at regular intervals to keep your pain signals low. Mm-hmm. And that’s something you kinda wanna get, uh, ahead of, um, because as soon as the, the pain starts to kick in where it’s unbearable, like if you haven’t gotten ahead of it, you’re gonna start to put your system into dysregulation and it will create what we call attentional networks, where your subconscious brain is now like, am I in pain?

Am I in pain? Am I in pain? Mm-hmm. Or of a, of a stress response. Um, so yeah. And then also your body is gonna likely discharge. Right. So shaking, okay, shaking, crying. This actually not something that needs to be. Turned down. So like I’ve had some people where I started shaking after my surgery and the nurses wanted to give me more medication to put me out or to numb me more.

Um, discharge is actually your, again, your [01:06:00] body’s natural way of letting go of the adrenaline and stress, right? So we can allow that to happen in a way that doesn’t, um, you know, risk harm or, you know, like the surgery site or something like that. Know that that’s actually a really positive thing that’s happening and try not to interrupt it, um, if, if you can.

Um, and then the final, final thing actually is probably renegotiating the, the surgery. So if you have an experience where you felt like it turned into a medical trauma, you can work with an SE professional. To complete what we call our self-protective responses. Mm. That are addressed, that are associated with what happened.

So for instance, like I’ve had now a couple of clients where they went in for a surgery and something else was done without their consent. Mm-hmm. Person got a hysterectomy without their consent. And so like these are boundary breaches that can happen, that can greatly impact the nervous system. If something [01:07:00] like that happens, you know, something is done, something that doesn’t feel like it was safe, you can always work with a professional to kind of, um, what we call renegotiate, complete that experience to bring the nervous system to completion.

Yeah, I’ll just say two really, really quick things ’cause it, it, I think, mirrors exactly what you’re saying. I had a client who did, a patient who did go in for open abdominal surgery. It was supposed to be two hours, I think it ended up being six. And, you know, a number of different things happened. And so we did that.

I, I didn’t know that term, but that’s what we did where we went back in and we were like, you know what, if anything magically could have happened in your head, it doesn’t need to make sense, what would it have been? And she was like, you know what? I wish at that like two hour mark, they could have woken me up.

And, and all of this is in her head. ’cause we use a lot of imagery and I’ll have her close her eyes and there’s music playing. And so she reimagined that whole experience that he, we woke up, he told me what was happening. I understood. I agreed, and then I went back under for the next two. Yeah, my neck [01:08:00] felt really funky because I was laying there longer than I was supposed to.

I wish they could have put a pillow under my neck. So she imagined that. And then the body tension starts to ease. So there is, I, I sometimes talk to patients about that, that this doesn’t, this isn’t logical. What happened happened. We can’t go back and change it, but there’s something about renegotiating it in your psyche and in your body that is incredibly healing.

Absolutely. And then, I’m sorry, we call it somatic completion. And the great thing about the nervous system is that it’s not a rational system, right? It operates from the irrational mind, the, the emotional limbic system and the reptilian brain. And so it’s not a verbal system. So you, and that’s why you know when your nervous system gets triggered by a loud sound outside, and then you’re hiding in the corner because your body and your nervous system and your subconscious mind believes you’re back in, in combat.

But rationally, you’re like, I’m at home watching Seinfeld on the couch. And so just [01:09:00] think of that, right? Our triggers are, are irrational and so a lot of the work that we can do, we can work with visualization as a way to show and allow the nervous system to have a different experience and make a different choice completely.

The last one I’ll say, and then I promise I’ll let you go ’cause I know I’m taking you over is No, I have, I have time. I think I said ovarian cancer patient before, it’s actually, um, cervical, she had was experiencing cervical cancer. Yeah. One where they had to leave these devices in her for three days. She was strapped down to the bed for three days and what she said on our session right after that was about a week after.

She was in cer, you know, in that procedure for three days. She got home afterwards and she cried for basically three days straight. Mm. Mm-hmm. And I told her that that was your body metabolizing that experience. And even, you know, depth psychology, symbolism, synchronicities are very important to us. So the fact that it was a three day procedure and you cried for three days after is very interesting and symbolic to me.

But I encourage her, I, I don’t see that [01:10:00] as a bad sign. I’m glad you let yourself lean into that, even though it may have been very unsettling to feel this uncontrollable release and crying for three days straight. I think that really helped her metabolize that. Absolutely. Yeah, I would assume so. She was probably forced into an immobilized state down in the bottom of that nervous system ladder.

And I always tell people, we unfortunately can’t Spider-Man our way to the top back up to rest and digest. So that means your body and your nervous system has to go through that fight or flight response to release or discharge all of the adrenaline and cortisol that was filled within the body and within the the physiology.

And so when we go into fight or flight, it can feel really uncomfortable and really activating. That’s why when I work with clients who’ve been in dissociative or burnt out or fatigued state where they don’t feel a lot, there’s a lot of, you know, emotional or, or affect, uh, loss. And then they’re like, why am I now feeling anxious all of a sudden?

Why am [01:11:00] I feeling angry? Why am I irrational? Why am I crying? And it’s like, well, because your body is kind of thawing out. You’re, it’s like your subconscious and your nervous system is saying, we can handle it now. Right? And so, yeah, I always see that as a great sign of progress when people can allow those emotions to come through.

Mm-hmm. Oh my gosh. I could talk to you for hours. This has been so beautiful. Thank you so much. I think that’s gonna be really powerful for some of my clients and non-clients, just to be able to hear, particularly as it pertains to surgery, prepping for surgery, just so the audience can hear it from you.

Give us the title of your book where they can find you, where they can get it. We’ll make sure it’s all linked in the show notes, of course. But. So that we can hear it from you too. For sure. My book came out last month called Body First Healing, and it is a somatic roadmap to trauma recovery and somatic healing.

You can find more information about it@bodyfirsthealing.com, including all the places that you can buy it. And if you want to connect with me, you can find me [01:12:00] on social media, heal with Brit with two T’s. If you wanna work with me, you can also find more information@bodyfirsthealing.com. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Brit.

This was phenomenal. I really enjoyed this. Thank you.