Transform Your Life: Body-First Healing with Britt Piper

[00:00:00] Britt: I was probably at the lowest point in my life, and it wasn't even 30 days until after that sentencing that that's when I found myself in a jail cell. The judge said, "I know who you are. You're the survivor from the sexual assault case." And she said, "We're going to drop the charges, but you need to learn to live with your pain better." And in that moment, it's like she didn't say, you need to learn to get past it, get over it. She said, "You need to learn to live with it."

[00:00:39] Kate: Hi, there. Welcome back to Rawish with Kate Eckman. Got another deep, juicy, heartfelt conversation for you today. Going to do lots of healing. We have a beautiful story to share from author Britt Piper, who's also a somatic experiencing practitioner, and I want to share what that's about and how it can directly impact and benefit you. So Britt, thank you so much for being here today.

[00:01:00] Britt: Thank you. I'm excited.

[00:01:03] Kate: I'm excited too, because before we even hit Record, I just said to you, thank you for who you are, the work that you're doing, which would be impressive if you've had the most joyful, loveliest of circumstances your whole life. And because my goal here is to help erase stigmas, release shame, and really embrace our story as not just things that we go through, but things that are formative and things that we can learn from and then use to help transform the world. So thank you for even being willing to share all of that.

[00:01:35] Britt: Of course. Yeah. I always tell people there's the professional side of Britt, but I feel like a lot of my research started off as me search, my own story, my own experiences, and that certainly inspires a lot of the work that I do.

[00:01:48] Kate: Yeah, because I think it builds trust. You can have all the science and research in the world, but then there's a thing, I can already hear it in my throat chakra, those of us who have lived through some really devastating experiences and are here to share about them without the resentment and bitterness, but the hope in humanity.

[00:02:05] So your new book is Body-First Healing, a revolutionary guide to nervous system recovery. It is so gorgeous. Oh my gosh, watching on YouTube, you can see. And it's just packed full of, like you said, science-backed research, but also things that you've lived through and have learned from.

[00:02:24] So how does one even go about getting into the work of body-first healing? Because candidly, it's something I've just discovered recently, and it has made sense why talk therapy or just the mind alone cannot heal us. It actually can get in our way and that our body holds so much wisdom. And your mind might say like, "Oh no, I'm great." And your body is telling a much different story.

[00:02:46] Britt: Absolutely. I think that a lot of people listening can probably relate, and it sounds like you can too. In my personal experience, I was in and out of traditional conventional therapy for most of my life, and it was supportive. And it brought temporary relief, but it never brought the resolution that I was looking for.

[00:03:05] It's like I would go through these periods of like, okay, I think I'm okay. I think life is okay. I think things are getting better, but oh wait. And then I would have some episode or some experience that would take me right back to square one. And so I felt really-- and this is the word we hear a lot in this space-- I felt really stuck.

[00:03:24] And the book, Body-First Healing, it says, Get Unstuck and Recover from Trauma with Somatic Healing. And that stuckness that we talk about is the nervous system. And I know that the nervous system is like a really, I don't want to say trendy. We can say trendy.

[00:03:40] It's a trendy topic these days, which is so exciting because I've been in the nervous system in somatic space for quite some time. But it was really in my early to mid-20s that I found that I fell into this work personally in my own recovery. And in just a short amount of time, I made a lot more progress than I did over a decade of traditional therapy.

[00:04:05] And so when we talk about trauma, it's really any experience that overwhelms the nervous system's capacity to cope. And when that happens, your nervous system gets stuck in the survival responses, like the muscle memory, the instinctual responses that it enlisted back then in order to survive. But it's repeating those patterns in the here and now.

[00:04:30] And when you work with the nervous system, it's a subcortical, or what we call somatic system. So you can access it through the body, not through talking and thinking. So that means getting in touch with your emotions, your sensations, your impulses, your body, your posture, all those things.

[00:04:48] And so from a body-based approach, it's not so much saying that thinking about our trauma and talking about our trauma can't be helpful, because it can be. But my belief is that when we start with the body, when we do a body-first approach, get the nervous system unstuck, get us back into regulation, create a sense of safety within the body so the nervous system isn't like, I'm still running from that tiger that I experienced when I was three years old, even though I'm a 35-year-old now-- I'm not. I'm 36. I was just throwing that randomly out there.

[00:05:20] But that's what the nervous system believes and feels. And so it's more so about showing the body what the mind already knows. In our mind, it's like we know the trauma is over, but the body and nervous system is not. It doesn't feel the same way. So yeah, it's not that one is better than the other. It's just that a somatic approach, starting with that first can be really helpful before you get into any kind of cognitive work.

[00:05:48] Kate: Okay. And I want to back up just a little because I want to dive deep into the somatic experience and even give people some tools for how they can incorporate it now, simple things, and then of course, hire someone like you to help them work through things. I think it is one of the most valuable things we can do for ourselves, and it really, for me, is the key to the abundance, to the joy, to the fulfilling relationships, to a life that lights us up.

[00:06:11] And I know a lot of people don't want to think or hear about this and experience some resistance to it because it's like, who has time for that? Or who wants to do that? Or, I don't want to look at that. And I think that's why when I saw your face today, I was just like, "My gosh, you're a superhero to me." Because so many women, for instance, experience assault and the R word, which I don't even like to say that word.

[00:06:33] And when I look at you, you use the word so openly. You are a sexual assault prevention specialist. Have worked with the Department of Justice, with the US Army, with Laura Bush. And it's so admirable because I think those of us who have experienced it, we don't want to touch that, let alone think about it, let alone spend our time and energy and work on it.

[00:06:55] And I just want to give all of us more compassion and grace and wisdom as it relates to this topic. And if you're fortunate enough to not have experienced the trauma and tragedy of this, everyone knows someone, whether you know they went through that or not, who has experienced this because the statistics are truly horrifying.

[00:07:13] Where did this bravery come from to-- again, you've been in the foster care system. You've lost your brother. You went through this. You were in jail at one point. Where does the bravery and courage and strength come from to even get a grip on all of this and talk about it and teach on it and get book deals? It really is impressive.

[00:07:33] Britt: Thank you. I'm trying to think of where to start with that. I think that my definition of bravery has changed over the years. I don't think. I know. It's definitely changed over the years. And so I grew up in a home that was very much so, like, we take our problems, we take our pain, and we just push it under the rug, and we just keep pushing.

[00:07:55] And so for the longest time, I thought that's what being strong meant, was to harden yourself to life, to muscle through, to armor up. Knowing what I know now, I know that it's actually a trauma response. It's our nervous system and our brain's brilliant way of protecting us from something that is too hard to face.

[00:08:17] And so when I was 20 years old, you touched on this-- this was after I had already lost my brother in a car accident-- I was sexually assaulted by a stranger who helped me change my flat tire. And following that two-year grueling trial process, this man had been in and out of the prison system for most of his life, so he knew how to work the system.

[00:08:42] And in working in the sexual violence prevention space, I know that this is often a strategy that a perpetrator's defense team will use when the perpetrator doesn't have a good case. What they will do is they will drag out the trial. They'll postpone the trial as many times as they can-- they call it a continuance-- with the hopes of emotionally, we could say, beating down the victim so that the victim will essentially drop the charges.

[00:09:14] And during that two-year period, my trial was postponed nine times, which meant that nine times I had to get ready for dress rehearsal. So I had to meet with my attorneys. I had to go through tape statements, depositions, practice being on the witness stand. And I became, during that time, a shell of myself. And after those two years, we went to trial. He was sentenced to 60 years behind bars. Yes, which isn't often the case unfortunately.

[00:09:48] But I remember watching the news that night with my family and this news anchor saying to the other co-anchor, she said, "20 years of covering court trials, I don't think I've ever seen a rape victim who was this poised, this composed, was able to look her rapist in the eye and say, you did this and you're going to pay."

[00:10:08] But what people didn't know is that on the outside, again, I "looked" brave. I seemed to have it all together. But internally and behind the scenes, I was probably at the lowest point in my life. I was seriously struggling with alcohol abuse, pill dependence, suicidal ideation, eating disorders.

[00:10:29] And it wasn't even 30 days until after that sentencing that that's when I found myself in a jail cell. And we can get into maybe those details later of how I ended up there because I do think it's a really great story to share about how the nervous system keeps us stuck in states of survival. But essentially, I remember going before the judge, after I was arrested, and she said, "I know who you are, and you're the survivor from the sexual assault case."

[00:10:57] And she told me that she was going to drop the charges, but these words that she said, and I mentioned these in the book, I think were a turning point for me, like a light bulb went off. She said, "We're going to drop the charges, but you need to learn to live with your pain better." And in that moment, it's like she didn't say, you need to learn to get past it, get over it. She said, "You need to learn to live with it."

[00:11:17] I think for most of my life I had been running and denying and invalidating a lot of my own struggles. I'm getting emotional just talking about it now, and I'm feeling that in the resonance between you and I. I think a lot of us do that. We're conditioned to push it down, but our bodies aren't built to carry all of that. It's meant to come out.

[00:11:37] And so, yeah, my definition of strong changed in that moment and it was less about meeting my pain with, oh, I've moved past it, and I've gotten over it, and look what I'm doing with it now. And while that can be true, what is also true is that my pain has made me stronger, yes, but it's also made me softer.

[00:11:58] It's made me a more empathetic person. It's made me so much more embodied. It's allowed me to really be with a lot of my grief and my pain from the past. There's that saying that you can only meet people as deeply as you've met yourself. And I notice that in my work, that the more that I can attend to and attune to myself, I'm such a better person.

[00:12:23] When I'm sitting in the practitioner role, I'm such a better wife. I'm such a better daughter. I'm such a better mother when I can show up for myself and give myself a lot of that love that I didn't deserve back then. So anyways, it reminds me of this. So I have this tattoo on my arm, if you're watching on YouTube. It says [Inaudible]. I'm probably not saying it right. It's Latin. I don't speak Latin. I don't speak Latin. I don't know Latin. But it says strong and tender.

[00:12:49] It reminds me that your pain can make you strong, but don't allow it to harden you. Allow it to also soften you. So anyways, you asked a really big question for me because it's something that I talk about a lot because people ask me like, "How are you so strong? How are you so brave?" And I think it's more so welcoming the messy parts of yourself and being able to really unveil that mask and realize that that's okay.

[00:13:18] Kate: Thank you so much for that. There's little God winks that happen every time, every episode of this show, which I feel like I cry every time. But I'm like, "You know what? All my favorite songs and films make me cry. Bring out that emotion." And we're creating art here through storytelling because you guys are all so incredible.

[00:13:36] My name, Kate, and Catherine means strong, yet feminine. And then I love that you have a tattoo that's strong yet tender. You said something that the judge said that stuck with you and that will stick with me forever, that we need to get better at living with the pain.

[00:13:52] Britt: Yeah.

[00:13:53] Kate: And I'm so passionate about this topic, and you and I have been through tremendous pain, and everyone goes through their varying degrees and some are just so disconnected. And I say this lovingly because we've all been there, but I think we all need to get better at living with the pain. And it's not talked about as much. It's getting better.

[00:14:13] There's people like you and I talking about it, but our culture, it's all about making money and your business strategy and get the guy and look hot and lose weight, which is so toxic. And I'm like, "Gosh, can you imagine a world--" But you and I are creating it.

[00:14:27] Britt: Can I also add, a distraction?

[00:14:31] Kate: A distraction.

[00:14:32] Britt: A lot of that is a distraction from--

[00:14:34] Kate: From the pain. And so you heard that it struck a chord with you. I was going to ask, how did your brain interpret that? Or did your body step into and say, "Yeah, I agree with her?" And gave you some intuitive guidance. Or what was a next step after? Because that's a huge crux in the story. That's a huge moment of time to think, oh wow, things are changing here.

[00:14:59] Britt: Yeah. I think maybe now is a good time. I can give some of the context as to how I ended up in that jail cell. Because I think that also plays a big role into how that was such a turning point. Her message to me, which I felt like were words of encouragement, I felt like this wasn't a judge that was judging me. It was a judge that was being like, "You can do this." You can do the hard stuff. You don't have to run away from it.

[00:15:22] Kate: I love that it was a woman.

[00:15:23] Britt: I always say too, she legitimately looked like Judge Judy, which I just find really funny and really sweet. If you can just envision that. So maybe to give some context because I think this will lead into what my next steps look like. So at the time, again, this was 30 days after the sentencing, he was sentenced to 60 years.

[00:15:47] And it's interesting because I think all along during the whole trial process, I thought, once he gets sentenced, or if he gets sentenced, if he gets convicted, I'll be okay. How often do we wait for something to happen to like be okay? And I found that when the sentencing came, I actually felt even more out of control in my body because, again, I think it was a distraction and it was also something that helped me to really stay disconnected and dissociated from my body.

[00:16:17] Because for two years there was this perspective of I'm going to see him again. I'm going to see him again. So I was very much so in the throes of survival mode. But after that, there was this unraveling that happened. And so 30 days after the sentencing, I was out one night with my boyfriend who was drinking and driving. I was in the passenger seat.

[00:16:39] I always say that should give you a really good indication of where I was at a time in my life. And he was pulled over, he was arrested, and as the police officers went to pull me out of the car to give me a ride home, in my impaired state, I had a flashback of the night of my assault because I was assaulted inside of my car.

[00:16:59] And my body went into this reenactment. I saw black. I blacked out, and I ended up in a jail cell with two counts of battery on an officer with injury. But it was in that jail cell, I remember calling my parents, telling them what happened. My dad said the same thing, like, "We're not bailing you out, and if you keep going down this road, you are literally going to kill yourself."

[00:17:25] They knew that I was in a really bad place, and I think they wanted me to learn my lesson, tough love. But it was in that six by eight jail cell, and I always call this my concrete bottom. Not my rock bottom, my concrete bottom. It was in this six by eight jail cell. I was literally in an orange jumpsuit that I was forced to really face my pain for the first time without any distractions, like we were just talking about.

[00:17:49] There was no alcohol. There were no drugs. There was no crappy toxic relationships. There was no busyness. There was nothing. It was just me and this treasure chest of pain from the past. And what happened over those three days in that jail cell was my body experienced things that I had never experienced before.

[00:18:09] A lot of trembling, shaking, emoting, wailing, sweating. It's like my body was having like this purge moment. And I remember the judge saying that. And I left that place with this awareness of, okay, it's not about learning how to get over my pants, about learning to be with it. And also, I feel different. I felt physically different in my body.

[00:18:36] I sometimes say I felt like I was a little fawn, this deer walking around with new legs. My body felt lighter. I felt like I had more clarity and just a new perspective about the world. And so it created a lot of curiosity in me. I'm like, "What just happened to my body in there? "

[00:18:55] Because I've been on every kind of medication for depression, anti-anxiety, ADHD. I had been on medication for a number of years. I had been to umpteen therapists, but what just happened in there? What just happened? And so I remember going to my therapist and telling her about it, and she said, "I think maybe you should work with someone as well who maybe focuses more on the body."

[00:19:20] And so she got me in touch with a somatic therapist, and I did that alongside of the cognitive therapy that I was doing. And again, I made remarkable change in my life in comparison to just the traditional therapy route. So that's where things started to shift for me.

[00:19:41] And I realized that my nervous system had been stuck in a fight response. Because during the assault, I tried to fight back, and I was overpowered. And so in somatic experiencing, I'm sure we're going to get into that maybe soon, but that's a lot of what we work with in our clients, is working with the stuck or residual survival hormones that are trapped within the body because they weren't allowed to come out during that traumatic experience.

[00:20:10] So that was my nervous system, again, trying to employ this, wait, we need to fight. We need to fight because it didn't get to do it back then. So that was a really big turning point for me.

[00:20:22] Kate: I love that there's these really substantial, poetic moments of time. It is like a movie. You know that moment with the judge and those words that, for me, it's, as a journalist, the soundbites, or the author, the quotes that stay with you forever in real time happening for you.

[00:20:35] That moment, it's like a movie. I can see you. You're so beautiful in your orange jumpsuit and your concrete bottom and these revelations come. And I want to remind everybody, you're still so young.

[00:20:48] Britt: Yeah. I was 22 at the time. Yeah, I was 22.

[00:20:52] Kate: A kid and coming to these momentous revelations that some people don't have ever. And again, having the wherewithal to, I'll say fight back, but it was more of a surrender but "fight back" or surrender in this really powerful way and even being open to these somatic healing experiences.

[00:21:12] And I would love to just tell people who aren't sure or maybe they do know about it, and just your experience of it, not just what it is, but how it really does release the trauma. But when I think of this, I guess in our culture that's all about monetary success and that sort of thing, if maybe that's your only motivation, this healing does lead to monetary-- it leads to literally everything. I can't wait until that's a just accepted fact of life. Because it really is true in my experience and your experience.

[00:21:41] Britt: Yeah. So I would say that somatic healing is nervous system healing. The words are synonymous. And when people talk about somatic therapy, soma means body oriented. So there's a lot of somatic practitioners out there.

[00:21:56] And really what that means is that they're facilitating the work that they do, that they're an expert in, through a body approach, a body-based approach or lens. So there are somatic breath work facilitators. There are somatic body workers. There's somatic meditation coaches. There are somatic therapists.

[00:22:15] But what I'm specifically trained in is a trauma resolution modality called somatic experiencing. And it's actually been around for a very long time, which surprises people when I say that. It was actually developed back in the 1970s by Dr. Peter Levine. He's the developer, and he still writes books and does conferences and does our trainings.

[00:22:38] But Peter's work started off by studying animals in the wild, and he had this really fascinating question of like, animals in the wild are routinely facing threat. They're in survival mode all the time. So why do they not remain traumatized in the same way that humans do?

[00:22:58] And the reason that he asked this question is because humans have the same nervous system structures. Our nervous systems are identical to animals. Those are wild animals. We are human animals. We have a lot of the same primitive structures within the brain, the same subcortical regions within the brain, the same nervous system.

[00:23:18] And what he found through, I always get it mixed up, it's either ethology or ethnology, the study of animals in the wild, through natural observation, he found that animals in the wild, when they go into fight, flight, shutdown, freeze responses, after they come out of that, they allow the body to go through these physiological processes where they discharge all of the adrenaline and cortisol that gets released into the body when we go into fight or flight.

[00:23:48] So when we go into a sympathetic fight or flight response, our body gets flooded with adrenaline and cortisol to mobilize us to fight or flee. But that adrenaline cortisol has to go somewhere. And so animals, they do this through shaking, through trembling, through groaning, through these different movements in the body.

[00:24:06] But us as humans, we have not just a subconscious brain, but we also have a conscious brain, our human brain. Our rational and, maybe we could say, judgment brain. So our perspective of when I get really nervous and I have stage fright, how do I calm that down? How do I like breathe myself out of it? How do I bring my body back into regulation?

[00:24:28] And what people don't understand is that regulation is not just about calming down. It's also about allowing the body to metabolize and discharge the adrenaline and cortisol. So when we experience, again, something that overwhelms the nervous system, that means that the nervous system and the body essentially have all of these stuck and stored hormones of adrenaline and cortisol.

[00:24:51] And you can think of it like a pressure cooker. Over time, that pressure cooker of adrenaline and cortisol, which are stress hormones, if we're not allowing the lid to be lifted every now and then to let off steam, to allow our emotions to come out, to express ourselves, to allow ourselves to be with anger, we're really disconnected from our bodies in this world that we live in.

[00:25:12] And because of that, we have all of this pent-up stress hormones in our pressure cooker. And over time that stress starts to become chronic stress and it creates mental, emotional, physical health problems, what we call allostatic load. It starts to really create this wear and tear on the body.

[00:25:35] And so in somatic experiencing, we work with the body to help the body to discharge what is stuck within the body and the system. And what's also really important about somatic experiencing is that we don't necessarily work with verbal memory. The memory that you explain or put into words is explicit memory.

[00:25:56] We work with body memory, which is implicit memory. And that's where a lot of traumatic memory is stored. So our emotional memory, our sensory memory, our autonomic nervous system memory, which is what we call procedural pattern, when someone raises their voice at us, we might notice that, oh, I just slouched my shoulders forward and I'm hiding and putting my face down.

[00:26:20] That is muscle memory that was learned at some point in your life, and that's a nervous system response. We're going into a freeze or a shutdown. And so what we do is we work directly with those learned instincts, those procedural patterns to create new impulses, new responses through the body rather than through the brain. So we discharge the stuck energy, the stuck hormones of the trauma, and then we create new impulses in the body and the here and now to do now what we couldn't do back then.

[00:26:57] Kate: Wow. I'm just taking that all in because again, I'm going back to a 22-year-old young woman in the jail cell and what you had just endured. And I always like to say to people, "If I can do it, anybody can do it." And I say this with nothing but the utmost respect. It's like, if Britt can do it and you just heard what she's been through, not only can any of us do it, but we owe it to ourselves to do it.

[00:27:23] And I've even had people on the show talking about near-death experiences or they went through childhood trauma. They went through things like you have experienced to some degree, and they go about their life. And you see this played out with celebrity after celebrity after celebrity. Justin Bieber, perfect example. They go through stuff probably chronically or ongoing, and they're able to have some big career or any career and perform at a certain level and make some money and look good and get married or even have a kid, all of that.

[00:27:52] And then again, the body keeps the score, as they say. It just comes out with a vengeance and a fury. And all those things we're doing to numb, suppress, distract just blow up even more. Is that your experience working with people? And I want to have this be a moment of encouragement. Come on, we've got you. There's people here to help. But you see why so many people maybe don't want to take this on, because it's too scary or overwhelming.

[00:28:20] Britt: Mm-hmm. So there's a tagline in the somatic world, the somatic healing world, that somatic work is actually stupid simple. Because, good news here, it is supposed to be actually really gentle. And I think that there's a common misconception with the new viral trends of somatic exercises and somatic work in the social media world, which is, again, fantastic because this is work that's been around for so long and it's finally just now hitting the mainstream because people are realizing how effective it is.

[00:28:58] However, you see a lot of work of these cathartic, raging and screaming and these intense shaking and trembling. And catharsis can naturally happen, but somatic work like somatic experiencing is actually very, very gentle. And the reason for that is because the nervous system-- again, think of that pressure cooker. We don't want to blow the lid because that's going to feel really overwhelming to your nervous system.

[00:29:26] Trauma can be defined as anything that feels like too much, too fast, too soon, or not enough. And so if I'm working with someone who maybe in their childhood they experienced abuse, they have this really thwarted fight response. They have all this suppressed anger because they were never able to fight back or their system didn't fight back.

[00:29:50] And so this pressure cooker that's just waiting to explode. And often when I work with clients who have chronic fatigue, burnout, fibromyalgia, depression, that usually is because of the suppression of really intense charged emotions like anger and fear. So that often goes back to developmental trauma or trauma in our earlier years where we couldn't fight or flee.

[00:30:14] But anyways, I wouldn't lead a client into, okay, let's go straight into that moment when that thing happened and like, what would it feel like right now to fight back? That would overwhelm a nervous system. And so instead, and we call that the trauma vortex. So instead what we do is we don't go straight into the middle of that tornado, the middle of that trauma vortex, or at the deep end, you can say, which is what we see a lot in therapy.

[00:30:39] We're just thrown into the deep end of our deepest, darkest moments. Instead, somatic experiencing practitioners, we walk you into the shallow end and we allow you to touch into a moment of anger. We call this working the outer edges of that trauma vortex. We just touch and what was the moment recently that, I don't know, frustrated you?

[00:31:00] When my partner, I asked him to do the dishes, and he just ignored me. He didn't do it. And as you're saying that to me now, what do you notice in your body? Because I'm noticing from you that you're holding your breath up here in your diaphragm, and it looks like you're actually clenching your fist.

[00:31:15] Have you noticed that? Wow. Yeah, I am clenching my fist. And what do you notice in your hands? They're actually hot right now. They're actually clammy. Okay, so there's some anger on board. Can we allow that to be here for a moment? And so yes, we can allow it to be here. And then what happens next?

[00:31:32] Well, now there's heat rising and I'm feeling perspiration in my armpits. Okay, so some of that adrenaline and cortisol is now moving through the body. Can that be okay? And if it ever feels too overwhelming, then we step back out and we say, "Okay, let's come back to something that feels a little bit more neutral in your environment."

[00:31:48] I noticed there's a dog behind you. Let's say we're doing this on Zoom. I noticed there's like a dog behind you. Oh yeah, that's Sandy. Yeah, I've had her since I was whatever. And as you like, look at her-- and look, oh, she's perking her ears up at you. What do you notice now? I'm noticing, I actually just took a full breath.

[00:32:06] Okay. So we're coming back into regulation. So that's what it looks like in somatic work, is it's very gentle. But what we're doing is we are slowly just lifting the lid of the pressure cooker and putting it back down. So it's like we're letting out a little bit at a time.

[00:32:23] And by doing that, we call it somatic experiencing by being with the experience of the body in gentle ways. We are showing the nervous system and the body that, hey, you can actually be with moments of activation, which is fight, flight, shut down, freeze. And you don't have to remain stuck here.

[00:32:44] So we're creating these new patterns of I can be with anger and I can be okay. I can be with fear and I know I'm going to be okay. Does that make sense?

[00:32:48] Kate: It does.

[00:32:49] Britt: I don't know if I answered your question, but yeah, it's a really gentle approach.

[00:32:59] Kate: I think that's so beautiful. Do you remember one of your first experiences with this work where you thought, I'm a believer this works? And were you triggered? Were you angry? Were you happy? Were you sad? Were you cold? Were you sweaty? I'm just so curious what happened that you didn't give up. You didn't say, "Screw this." You didn't go get drunk. Or maybe you did, but you thought, wow, this is life changing, and I really want to dedicate my life to healing myself and others through this work.

[00:33:26] Britt: Yeah. I think that it was more so that as I started to work with a somatic therapist, I was really surprised by how slow it was. And at first, I was actually resistant to it.

[00:33:41] Kate: Of course.

[00:33:43] Britt: Yeah. Half of the clients that I work with, they're like, "Oh, this is just my pace. This is just my cup of tea. We don't have to talk about trauma. Fantastic." And then the other half were like, "No, I want to get to it. I want to get it done. Let's go right now." I was that person. And I'm a recovering workaholic, you could say. And I talk about that in the book, that that was also a trauma response that was really passed down through four generations of women in my family.

[00:34:11] So those patterns are very interesting. But I was like, "I don't have time for this. Let's get this going." But I was really fascinated by how much changed by how little was actually being done. And Peter Levine, he often says that slower is actually faster when it comes to working with the nervous system because it feels safer. And a lot of us, the goal in this work is to actually slow down our nervous system.

[00:34:41] So many of us are just like, when you have all that adrenaline and cortisol, again, we are mobilized. We have our foot on the gas at all times, and then, of course, that turns into all of these trauma responses of, well, I'm going to use all of this energy that's really survival energy from the past and now I'm going to just work all the time. Or I'm going to use it to fuel my really crappy relationship and all the stress in my relationship, or all of these different things.

[00:35:09] So for me, I think the turning point was recognizing that I could actually slow down and be okay. I think I had been really overriding my whole life and muscling through and armoring through. And so slowing down was probably the biggest, I think, change and transition for me. And that's when I was like, wow, I can be present with myself and I can be okay.

[00:35:34] I can be with discomfort and I can be okay. And now that I'm actually connecting to myself for the first time in my life, not only do I have the capacity to feel like what doesn't feel good, but I also have the capacity to feel more of what does feel good. Yeah.

[00:35:50] Kate: You're speaking to my heart. People who are listening, you can't see it. But if you're watching, I'm literally shaking out my arms; I'm taking deep breaths; I'm having physical reactions because I'm feeling what you're saying in my body because I've been on a similar journey. And I wish what we also talked a little bit more about is that it can be lonely at times because you just said it.

[00:36:12] It's like you're slowing down, you're connecting to yourself, you're listening to yourself, you're caring for yourself. And so you see, without making anybody or anything wrong or bad, just how out of alignment you are with so many things in your life, and it can feel heartbreaking. And you think, gosh, I love this person, but they do not treat me how I treat myself now, or in a way that feels good, and then they don't understand what's going on.

[00:36:40] So it can bring up so much. And we're only responsible for our happiness and our feelings and our healing. And then for me, I've had to really let this go, Britt. I'm throwing a lot at you, but I care so much, which feels like a gift and a curse, and not just myself, but others. And it has been this practice of letting go in terms of not wanting things for other people that they don't want for themselves.

[00:37:08] So there's so much to unpack here, but any insight you could just give us, those of us who are not doing this work at all, maybe dipping our toe in, those of us who are well into the journey? But I'm a person. I'm a teacher and a student, and proud to be both. And I always am looking for different insights because a huge takeaway from our conversation already is it can just be one person and one sentence, or one word, or one thing or idea that they say that can change our lives.

[00:37:35] Britt: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Going back to the relationships, you mentioned that it can be very lonely as you start to do this work because you're finding that there are things in your life, relationships in your life, circumstances in your life that actually don't align with your authentic values-- not your autopilot self, but your authentic self.

[00:37:55] And what I like to say is that we don't choose the people or the places in our lives. Our nervous system does. I wish everyone had responded like that. It's so [Inaudible] though, right? So if you're in a flight response and a lot of your life is guided by like fear, worry, anxiety, you are going to attract the relationships that cultivate more of that in you and in your life. You're going to become anxious in relationships, you're going to cling.

[00:38:30] In the book, I have an entire chapter about attachment and how much the nervous system impacts our attachment styles, and how much our attachment in early childhood and our first three years of life actually creates the landscape of how our nervous system develops. But as you start to regulate your nervous system, you will find that there is almost a new standard for your relationships.

[00:38:56] And it's not so much that these relationships were bad or these circumstances are bad. It's just that they no longer align with who you are in this season of life. So it can feel lonely and it can feel isolating, but it can also feel incredibly empowering because it's like you finally have this language of like, what's a no for me in relationships and what's a yes? Rather than going with the flow because we're on this autopilot.

[00:39:23] So you really give yourself a lot more control and clarity into what's for me and what's not for me? That becomes crystal clear. So you said that you probably, you care a lot about others.

[00:39:38] Kate: Yeah.

[00:39:39] Britt: Would you mind me asking a personal question? Is that okay?

[00:39:41] Kate: Go for it. Yeah.

[00:39:42] Britt: Okay. Do you feel like that's something that you're giving out to others because it's something that you lacked at some point in your life?

[00:39:48] Kate: 100%. And I want to laugh and cry simultaneously.

[00:39:54] Britt: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We often give out what we missed or we often gift the world with what we maybe wish we had more of. And we often say that the people pleasing parts of us, which are the fawning, appeasing parts of us, which by the way, I talk a lot about in my book, that's my dominant response.

[00:40:19] When I'm not in a state of regulation, I was a perpetual fawner. And it's something that I'm working with even now. But what you often find is that that's because we might have found that love was conditional, that love had to be earned, that our authentic selves weren't accepted.

[00:40:37] And for me, and what you see in a lot of the research is, and I think Gabor Mate says this, that when it comes to childhood, a child will always choose attachment over authentic expression. So if our authentic expression, our big personality as a child, or our tears, or our "tantrums," if that's something that disregulates or potentially threatens disconnection from our caregivers, like they don't like that, or we're going to get in trouble, or I'm going to put you somewhere else, even as babies, we learn this in our pre-verbal years.

[00:41:19] If we learn that early on, that our authentic expression or who we are is not okay, and that it threatens our attachment, then we will shapeshift. We will chameleonize who we are in order to stay connected because our attachment is the most important thing to our survival, our connection to our caregivers.

[00:41:39] And so that's a pattern that can certainly carry on into adulthood. And for me, a lot of that experience stemmed from my first probably couple of years in life. You mentioned this. I was taken from my mom at birth, and I was put into foster care because there was methamphetamine found in her system. And I was reunited with her, I would say, a few months later after she got her life back on track.

[00:42:04] But she was a very young mom, and she was a kid just raising kids. She was a single parent, and she also, and I touch on this in the book, wasn't really given a lot of the tools herself as a child. And her work became her everything. So a lot of her trauma, a lot of her stress, she became addicted to work.

[00:42:26] And so kids fell to the back burner. And so I always carried around this fear of abandonment, this sense of not belonging, feeling like I wasn't loved. And that created these deep patterns of just wanting to please others, wanting to pacify, wanting to placate, wanting to keep the peace in order to avoid conflict or disconnection. Because I was so desperate for love and belonging.

[00:42:53] But by doing that, I was also abandoning myself. I was sacrificing what was important to me. So that's something that I still work on to this day. I've gotten so, so, so much better at it. My way of looking at that is, yeah, we usually give out in the world what we often didn't receive. But we can change those. We can change those patterns.

[00:43:15] Kate: Yeah. I've never heard it explained that way about our authentic selves and then the attachment. On one hand it's liberating to hear a truth. It's a beautiful truth. It's liberating and heartbreaking because you see. And as you are talking, I'm seeing that outgoing, bodacious, loud, charismatic child who even the old video cameras, being like, woo.

[00:43:41] And my mom, it's always like, quiet down. Even as a grown adult, my parents still, it's like quiet down. And that can have so many different meanings. It's not just about volume, but I think even this show is just such an act of embracing my authentic self and telling my story and sharing other people's story.

[00:44:01] And in telling your story, me sharing things like this, that just comes out because I'm learning and growing through this conversation and through your wisdom and story. And if people are offended, that's on them. But what does Taylor Swift say? People are like, are you going to stop writing songs about guys being jerks?"

[00:44:17] She's like, "No. They can stop being jerks, but I'm going to write about my experience." And she's in a stratosphere all of her own because-- so it speaks to authenticity, whether you like her music or not. I just have the chills in this conversation because I think we all deserve freedom and liberation in ourselves, but also in our bodies, and being okay, even if it's uncomfortable at first, upsetting somebody or no longer being in relationship with somebody and then attracting people--

[00:44:48] I just keep meeting people like you who make me feel so seen. And that's another thing. I did not feel seen or heard. And so it's like, let me create a whole platform about seeing and hearing other people and seeing you so crystal clearly and hearing you, not just privately, but like, now let's share it with the world. We all need to feel seen and heard and share our beautiful stories.

[00:45:09] Britt: Yeah, it reminds me a lot of this concept when people talk about, again, regulation. We talk about how to calm down, but a lot of nervous system regulation work and somatic work is also learning about how to rise into our power and our aliveness, what Peter refers to as our life force or our vitality.

[00:45:28] And when that gets extinguished from us at an early age when we're not allowed to be with a healthy fight or flight response-- and when we talk about the fight response, we're also talking about it's not just protecting and defending and like fighting back all the time.

[00:45:43] There's something called healthy aggression. And this is something that we experience in our fight response, but the word aggression comes from the Latin joining [Speaking Latin], which means to move forward, to go after what you want, to get what you want in life. And you need to have some healthy aggression to do that.

[00:46:01] But if we've learned that we need to diminish ourselves, to make ourselves small, to override what we authentically want, we can lose access to that life force that propels us in life. And that's where a lot of that stuckness comes from, is that people don't feel alive. They feel like they're just surviving.

[00:46:21] And one of the beautiful things about this work is that people usually come into my practice either because they have trauma, they have these big glaring events that leave craters in their life and they're like, "I know I have this experience. Let's work through it." Or they come with signs and symptoms of trauma, but they don't know what happened.

[00:46:41] And they're like, "Why am I experiencing this in my body? Why do I have these physical symptoms? Or why do I have these mental or emotional symptoms, anxiety, depression, brain fog, chronic fatigue? Why do I have these patterns of people pleasing and fawning all the time?" Are like, "I just can't set boundaries in relationships. Why am I like this?"

[00:46:59] And what we often almost always find is that it goes back to childhood, which is why more than half of this book is about childhood. It's about our attachment patterns. It's about our attachment relationships in our first few years of life.

[00:47:14] Because that sets, you could say, the patterns or the muscle memory of how we show up in our lives. Just talking about relationships, they say that 80% of adults will have the same attachment style in adulthood than they had at 18 months old. Same attachment style as 18 months old. And that's all based on the relationship that you have with your caregivers.

[00:47:39] And people are like, "Wait, but how does that happen?" A baby can't even comprehend the world at 18 months. But they're taking in body memory, nervous system memory, all these patterns. And so in the conclusion of my book, I talk about my kids, and I use the book, Where the Wild Things Are. And in that book, Max-- have you read Where the Wild Things Are?

[00:48:02] Kate: Yeah, of course.

[00:48:04] Britt: It's this whole journey of Max going to explore where the wild things are. And the wild things I didn't realize this until I became a parent and I was a little bit more conscious and I was like," Oh." The wild things are our untamed emotions.

[00:48:21] And when you look into the book, it's like, oh my gosh. He was talking about these big, huge emotions that kids get and how we always try and tame them. And so when you talk about freedom to be who we are, I feel like we're finally at a place where it's less of like, how do I fix myself and fix these problems that I have?

[00:48:40] But it's more like, how do I rediscover who I was before trauma and my nervous system told me who to be? It's a lot of unlearning. It's a lot of going backwards and re-meeting those younger parts of ourselves, filling ourselves with kid-like wonder and expression and play and learning how to be present in nature.

[00:48:59] And that's why we say somatic work can also sometimes feel stupid simple. Because we do things like, yes, there are your triggers, but what are your glimmers? And people are like, "What do you mean what are my glimmers?" And it's like, can you get outside today and just look at a dang flower? Just go look at a flower for a minute and notice how that feels in your body as you look at it.

[00:49:19] And it feels and sounds so silly and so simple, but it's this language that we have become so disconnected from, of wonder and curiosity and freedom and expression. So anyways, the conclusion of my book, it's talking about-- my kids were jumping on my bed as I was writing in my laptop this last chapter, and I'm just like-- I'm getting emotional just talking about it, but I hope that they really keep that kid-like wonder.

[00:49:50] Because I think so many of us crave that as adults. And what you find in this work is that that's often what we come home to. I'm going all over the place, but one other thing I want to say is that somatic experiencing, the definition of it is that it's a naturalistic approach to trauma recovery. And when we talk about naturalistic, what we're talking about is not looking outward at like, oh, I need a specialist or a medication. And yes, those things can be supportive, but a naturalistic approach is actually positioning ourselves to look inward, to go back into the innate tools, capacities that we have to self-heal.

[00:50:33] Like we are self-healing, self-generating organisms, just like nature. We can heal on our own. And so it's about, again, turning inward to a lot of that capacity that we have.

[00:50:46] Kate: Mm-hmm. And you're just reminding me of when I go on my walks in the park and I feel like all the adults are scowling. I'm not even trying to, it's Los Angeles too.

[00:50:54] I'm not even trying to make eye contact with people anymore. There's my few regulars and smile. But on the other hand, it's some of the most gorgeous trees, plants, flowers I've ever seen in my life. I honor them, I connect with them. I look up at them, the most beautiful, cutest dogs who are all running around, smiling and playing.

[00:51:12] So I'm really connecting with their energy. And then the adults don't talk to me, but the kids are always like, hi. They're just striking up a conversation with me. I like your lip gloss. I like your nail. They're touching my nails, strangers. And it just speaks for me, I'm in alignment. I'm on the right track because I'm resonating with children, dogs and plants and trees.

[00:51:32] Yes. And so that, but that just, it is it, but then sometimes I'm like, gosh, there's just so few adults I feel like I can relate to anymore. And being okay with that. And I think what's coming up too, I'm still curious to get your answer on this, is I heard through the grapevine, somebody a relative, kind of alluding to, well, you do this work or you talk about these things, and people who refuse or aren't interested or unwilling may say things like, oh, well, she thinks she's better than people.

[00:52:01] And it's kind of that vibe. And I'll just stop there. I'd love your insight on that because that's still not what's going on. And it's such a low vibrational comment or response. And for me it's just like them being okay, settling for mediocracy A, and B, your bigness, your boldness, your brightness, clearly seeing you doing the work is making them feel small. That's how my brain interprets it, but it's still hurtful.

[00:52:31] Britt: Exactly. Yeah. It can be incredibly hurtful. And it actually-- so the story that you were just sharing about attracting dogs and kids, being on that wavelength makes so much sense into your question here.

[00:52:44] So the nervous system, we say there's this formula that same equals safe. Your nervous system is going to be attracted to what feels familiar because it's predictable. Because it's like, this is familiar, this feels the same to me. I know I can survive this. I know how to deal with this. That's why your nervous system will often get stuck in patterns that feel familiar, even though they're not really safe for you.

[00:53:13] And when you start to change in your life, the people that you're around, that's not going to feel familiar for them, that's not going to feel safe. And again, we can refer to this as like mirror emotions, mirror neurons, heart coherence, co-regulation. We are always on a bit of a wavelength with the people around us.

[00:53:36] So if you're around someone who's anxious all the time, over time, your nervous system is going to start to pick up on that and feel that. So our nervous systems can mirror the nervous systems around us. So when your nervous system starts to change, starts to become more regulated, and you're around someone who's maybe not as regulated, that can feel like a threat to them because it doesn't feel familiar. It doesn't feel safe.

[00:53:57] And so in their mind, they have to rationalize that there's a reason why this doesn't feel good in my body. There's a reason why this doesn't feel good for me, that this person is changing, and rather than taking ownership that it's me, I'm going to make it, it's them. So yeah, there's science behind that.

[00:54:18] And again, that's just going back to your nervous system chooses people. We don't. And so when your nervous system starts to change the other nervous systems that are around you, if they're not in line with that nervous system, that it's going to feel like a threat.

[00:54:33] Kate: Yeah. And for me, sometimes it feels like wanting to cross the street away from certain energies. I know that sounds maybe dramatic, but I just feel so protective over my inner child and my energy and my nervous system. I'm going to go balance it at the meditation center earlier with the frequencies and the vibrations. I'm laying on a vibrating mat and it works. I can feel it. It's NASA science.

[00:54:54] I mean, it works. I am a such a believer in the work that you're doing and who you are as a human, is just you're a superhero. How has writing this book Body First Healing changed you or brought you to even greater depths of yourself or anything you want to share? Because for those who haven't, first of all, writing a book and getting a book deal, especially as a non-celebrity, is so much work and not an easy feat.

[00:55:20] So I want to congratulate and applaud that it is a lot of work, and I don't think people fully understand that. So I just want to-- please go support Britt and her work and yourself. But how has this experience really changed you?

[00:55:35] Britt: Yeah. I think that what was important for me in the beginning of this process was having an experience that felt-- I know this sounds like so basic, but having this being an experience that felt good and not stressful, and of course, it's stressful. Of course, it's stressful, but I'm not saying it was without stress. However, in the same way that you just said that your system is kind of at this place where it's like, I want to cross the street and get away from these people--

[00:56:01] I was very intentional about who I wanted to work with on my book. And every meeting that I went into, as you're like pitching your book to publishers, it was important to me that I expressed what my yeses were and what my nos were. This is what I don't want in the process. This is what I do want in the process.

[00:56:19] Knowing that the people who were okay with that were the people who would come to the table, if you will, and want to partner together. And so that certainly made the experience feel much more aligned throughout because I feel like I'm working with a team who really cares about the book, who really cares about me, and that makes a huge difference.

[00:56:41] But also, just from a personal perspective, the healing work never ends. It doesn't matter if you're an expert in this space, if you've lived it, breathed it, you've been on your healing journey for decades. It literally never ends. And so this book, I think for me was just a reminder of that because I've been in a silo for a lot of my recovery, just doing my own personal work.

[00:57:06] And this book required that I start to include people in my life in that process. So that meant really hard, but also very productive and very healing conversations with family members like my mother, like my grandmother. Things we had never talked about before. And it's like, it's time for us to talk about this.

[00:57:28] And so it was very rewarding in that sense that there was a lot of, I feel like, words that were unspoken that finally were able to be spoken. So that was really beautiful. And then, yeah, I think that, again, just coming back to my kids, I kept thinking in my mind like, we talk a lot about like cycle breakers and breaking generational patterns, and I just kept reminding myself like, my kids are going to read this one day.

[00:57:55] And there's so much that I learned. I'm getting emotional, just talking about it, but in the really deep conversations I had with my mom, I learned so much more about who she is and a lot of the things that she went through. And it really informed, it gave me so much more information about why she made a lot of the decisions that she did, why we went through the things that we did.

[00:58:19] It helped to explain our experiences as children. It didn't excuse it, but it helped to explain it. And I just wish that we had had those conversations earlier. I wish I didn't have to be 36 years old and I'm writing a book, so we should probably talk about this. And so I'm walking away with just that awareness that my kids get to know these stories early on.

[00:58:44] Not just my stories, but the stories of my family and what we've all collectively gone through. And I know that that is going to bring a lot of healing and a lot of resolution in their life too. So, yeah, those are probably the big three takeaways is I felt a team. I found a team that I felt aligned with and I had a lot of really personal and important conversations, which were really healing, and then just how that impacts my kids.

[00:59:08] Kate: That's true success right there. Thank you for sharing that. Do you ever just sit with yourself and take in that you are a miracle and your life is a miracle you, because I'm taking it in. I don't have kids, so you're my adult kid. It would be impossible, but I do, I feel that motherly pride for you right now.

[00:59:31] Britt: You are going to make me cry. Thank you. No, I don't feel like. I feel like it's been hard to give myself credit, and that's something I actually I've shared about over the past year. If you follow me on social media, you know I'm very transparent. I think it's important that, especially as people who work in this space, and listen, it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I do like to share that like, yes, I am a professional in this space and I'm an expert and an author, but I'm also a human. And that life is messy and life is hard. And one of the things that I've shared over the past year is that it's been hard for me to celebrate myself in this book process. I shared about how we had to strategically go on a trip to San Diego just to be like, I wrote a book.

[01:00:14] I remember getting the news that like, you have a book deal. It's like, I remember my husband taking my shoulders and being like, you're allowed to be happy for yourself. And so I think that's something that I have struggled with, but I think because of the people that I have cultivated these beautiful, nurturing, loving relationships that I've cultivated in my life, that I've been able to have more of that inner dialogue with myself.

[01:00:43] But we always say that the way that we talk to ourselves usually mirrors the way that we were talked to in childhood. The way that we relate to ourselves mirrors how we were related to in childhood. And so that's not really a language that I-- I love my parents, but that's not a language that was really gifted to me. So it's a language that I've had to learn over time, and I have, again, these relationships that have really fostered that. So thank you.

[01:01:07] Kate: Well, I would like all of us to take a collective moment just to celebrate you and your journey, and your story, and your courage and your strength, because it is so beautiful, and it's people like you that keep me going. When it's, oh, I can't do it for myself, I do it for you and everyone who deserves a beautiful life despite where they started, what they've been through, mistakes made rightfully so based on our experiences. And I think it's just such a reminder to have more grace and compassion for ourselves and to stop what we're doing right now.

[01:01:38] And even if you feel like you are behind or you haven't achieved what you want to achieve or whatever it is, to just sit and wonder like we would at a beautiful mountain or sunset and just we're the sunset and think, wow, I am magnificent and I did this. So I invite you or encourage you, or hope you can take even just a minute today and take that in because you are extraordinary.

[01:02:01] My nervous system to yours. I feel like it's my nervous system acknowledging yours like, thank you because I feel great in your presence. Body First Healing: A Revolutionary Guide to Nervous System Recovery, it's a must read for everybody of all ages. Read it with friends, family members. I would just love one final little, I guess, body wisdom nugget that you can leave us with to-- yeah, it can be our Judge Judy moment of just something to carry in our hearts and our nervous systems moving forward.

[01:02:31] Britt: Yeah. Actually, I feel like it ties back to-- and thank you so much for the kind words. I felt like I was really, really taking those in, so thank you. I think in continuing that dialogue, just the relationship that we have to ourselves, if I could give one tip of encouragement to anyone who's stepping into this work, the intention behind like somatic healing, nervous system healing--

[01:02:55] Again, what you see a lot online is like the exercises and the vagus nerve stimulation and the, this is how we get rid of anxiety. And yes, nervous system regulation is cool, it's great, it's wonderful. However, what's more important in regulation is the relationship that we have with ourselves. If we are meeting ourselves, we're like, oh, there's anxiety here and I need to do a somatic practice to get rid of this anxiety, we're doing it from a place where we're trying to fix ourselves, where we're looking at ourselves like something is flawed. And again, if we can have-- we can relate to our very normal experiences in our body is this is just my body sending me a signal right now. This is probably a younger version of me who's stuck in a pattern.

[01:03:39] We always say triggers are just emotional age regressions. If we can relate to that in a much more loving way, the regulation comes much quicker, and it's much more sustainable. So I think just speaking to that relationship that we have with ourselves, we can always ask that question like, am I so focused on the healing work from a place of true love or from a place of-- I know it sounds harsh-- self-hatred, self-criticism. So just thinking about that, how you relate to that, I think could be really important.

[01:04:08] Kate: Yeah, you've just really brought on a inspiration to pause a bit today, and I think I will even just take a moment now and take all of this in and take in all of your wisdom and just love having your book on hand to turn to again and again, even just a page, one exercise.

[01:04:23] But just your story in itself is so inspiring and such a testament to your character. So thank you so much for being you, being here and doing this work. We appreciate you. You're just such a gem.

[01:04:32] Britt: I appreciate you very much. So thank you.

[01:04:35] Kate: Thank you so much, and thanks to all of you for tuning in. You'll have to go pick up Britt's book. It is a game changer. So please do it for yourself and everybody that you love and the world. We all need it right now. We'll see you next week everybody. Bye-bye.