Today's Heartlift with Janell
Sometimes the story we tell ourselves is not really true. Sometimes the story others tell about us is not really true. On "Today's Heartlift with Janell," Author, Trauma-informed, board-certified marriage and family specialist, and Professional Heartlifter, Janell Rardon, opens conversations about how emotional health and mental fitness effects absolutely every area of our lives. When we possess and practice healthy, strong, resilient emotional health practices, life is so much better. Read Janell's newest book, "Stronger Every Day: 9 Tools for an Emotionally Healthy You."
Today's Heartlift with Janell
313. Body First: A Revolutionary Approach to Trauma Recovery with Britt Piper
Brittany Piper, author of "Body-First Healing: Get Unstuck and Recover from Trauma with Somatic Healing." Brittany transforms our understanding of trauma recovery with her groundbreaking approach that places the body—not just the mind—at the center of healing. After surviving sexual assault, foster care experiences, and profound loss, Brittany found conventional therapy lacking until she discovered the missing piece: somatic healing that addresses trauma stored in the nervous system.
In this powerful conversation, Brittany guides us through the revolutionary science behind trauma recovery. She illuminates how our bodies get stuck in survival responses long after danger has passed, creating chronic stress that manifests as anxiety, rage, shutdown, or illness. Most importantly, she offers hope through accessible somatic practices that can help reset our nervous systems and reclaim our lives.
The discussion delves into fascinating concepts like polyvagal theory, neuroception, and titration. Brittany explains how our nervous systems operate as a three-state ladder rather than a simple on/off switch and demonstrates simple techniques to create evidence of safety for our hypervigilant systems. Perhaps most reassuringly, she emphasizes that healing isn't about eliminating all stress or uncomfortable emotions but developing the capacity to return to safety after activation.
Brittany's Story mentioned in our conversation: My Survivor Story
For more on Somatic Healing: traumahealing.org.
Learn more from Brittany and order her new book: Body-First Healing.
Visit Brittany's YouTube Channel: @HealwithBritt
Visit Brittany on Instagram: @healwithbritt
Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:
- Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online coaching center and meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
- Download the "Overcoming Hurtful Words" Study Guide PDF: BECOMING EMOTIONALLY HEALTHY
- Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon
- Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
- Learn more about my books and work: Janell Rardon
- Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
As I've listened to the stories of thousands of women of all ages in all kinds of stages through the years, I've kept their stories locked in the vault of my heart. I feel as if they've been walking around with me all through these years. They've bothered me, they've prodded me and sometimes kept me up at night. Ultimately, they've increased my passion to reframe and reimagine the powerful positions of mother and matriarch within the family system. I'm a problem solver, so I set out to find a way to perhaps change the trajectory of this silent and sad scenario about a dynamic yet untapped source of potential and purpose sitting in our homes and churches. It is time to come to the table, heartlifters, and unleash the power of maternal presence into the world. Welcome to Mothering for the Ages, our 2025 theme. Here on today's Heartlift. I'm Janelle. I am your guide here on this heartlifting journey. I invite you to grab a pen, a journal and a cup of something really delicious. May today's conversation give you clarity, courage and a revived sense of camaraderie. You see, you're not on this journey alone. We are unified as heartlifters and committed to bringing change into the world, one heart at a time.
Speaker 1:In her transformative new book, body First Healing A Revolutionary Guide to Nervous System Recovery. Brittany Piper, a somatic experiencing practitioner, speaker and trauma-trained educator, shares her compassionate, science-backed roadmap for trauma recovery and nervous system regulation. She teaches readers how to break free from survival mode and reclaim their lives using simple yet effective somatic practices. She doesn't just teach it, she's lived it. After enduring foster care, the loss of her brother and surviving sexual assault, she struggled to find healing through conventional therapy. It was only after finding herself in a jail cell that she took her healing into her own hands. Through years of self-discovery and learning that took her all around the globe, she developed the tools that transformed her life and now shares them with others. And today Britt is here to share with us.
Speaker 1:I want to give a little warning. We're talking about trauma and healing from trauma on the cellular level, so if you find yourself triggered in any way, take a break. Just take a break and come back. Okay, let's welcome Britt to the show. Heartlifters, I can't tell you how honored I am to have our next guest, brittany Piper, author of Body First Healing, which comes out very, very soon. By the time this comes out, it might be out, but who knows? Make sure you get this book. It is truly, I don't throw these words around very much life-changing. And Brittany, do we call you Brit or Brittany?
Speaker 2:Whichever I you know it's it's about, it's about half and half, so it just whatever is best for for your palate today.
Speaker 1:I have been following you and listening to you for so very long and so I just think of you as Brit in my brain, so I'll just probably call you Brit.
Speaker 1:I've been following you and doing the work that you offer in somatic healing because I know that I know we store trauma in our nerves and our being and, as I just said to you, I was a dancer my whole life and I think I now know that was how I coped. It had to be. The stage became the place, the only place where I felt embodied.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because I disembodied, like you did for many, many years of your life, numbed my body all of those things. So, first and foremost, a huge welcome from us. Thank you for being here.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you, I'm very excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you, I'm very excited to be here.
Speaker 1:It's just so awesome and I've told the Heartlifters so much about you. There's that beautiful video that you have that shares the depths of your story, and so, for the sake of our valuable time here, I'm not going to go deep into asking questions about that, because that video is incredible, that you created to tell your story, your survivor story but you talk about in the beginning of the book. You know this concrete, this place, right, this concrete place where you came to what we would call an awakening, I guess.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, share a little bit about that concrete. Yeah, you know, I think a lot of us have kind of our quintessential I don't want to call it a rock bottom, but a moment where we realize things need to change.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just I can't continue life in this way. And instead of a rock bottom I had a concrete bottom. So just a little bit of a backstory. Some context At the age of 20, I'm 36 now I was out one night with friends and at the end of the night I realized I had left my phone in a friend's purse. We had all parted ways. I was like oh, I got home, left my phone in a friend's purse. So I ventured out into the night by myself, drove to my friend's house and on the way there I hit a pothole and ended up with a flat tire. So pulled into a gas station. There's a stranger there. He helped me change a flat tire repeatedly, offered him money as a way to say thank you and he just insisted you know, can I please get a ride, and so Can I be a good Samaritan as it was described on the news Right.
Speaker 2:No, no. The absolute, yeah, absolute opposite monster in disguise and oh Brittany. Yeah. So yeah, I let him into my car and I don't. Yeah, we probably don't need to go into the details, but ultimately what happened is that he was sentenced to 60 years behind bars for sexual assault and confinement. But that's when I was 20.
Speaker 1:That's incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but he wasn't sentenced until I was 22. So the court case which I work a lot now with violent crimes units, first responders, the military, I do a lot of trauma, informed and neurobiology trainings on, like the investigative procedures and working with with victims, and this is not. This is a you know story as old as time. When it comes to sexual assault, yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's your story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but when a when a perpetrator does not have a case, they know that they were wrong, the evidence shows that they're wrong. What they'll do instead is, as a as a defense strategy, their attorneys will essentially postpone or continue the trial multiple times, try to drag it out as a way to mentally and emotionally exhaust the victim until they give up and drop the charges, and so my trial was postponed nine times, which meant that they call it a continuance Nine times over a two-year period.
Speaker 2:I essentially had to do a dress rehearsal, if you will, with my legal team, so I had to go in, listen to tape statements, go through depositions, pretend being on the witness stand Nine times. I had to relive every graphic detail of that night, and that was, I often say, more traumatizing than Retraumatizing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yep.
Speaker 2:Um, so I was not in a good place in those two years leading up to the trial. But on the outside you wouldn't. You wouldn't have known.
Speaker 1:Um, I seem to have it all together. Yeah. I get it. I. It's awful. I know we're called the high functioners. It's terrible. I get it, Dang it. No, we're called high functioners.
Speaker 2:It's terrible, I get it, dang it, but behind the scenes I was really struggling Strong substance abuse, really unhealthy coping mechanisms, very severe eating disorder, suicidal ideation. I was in a pretty bad relationship, pretty bad relationship and so not even 30 days after the sentencing, I was actually out one night. This takes us to the concrete bottom. I was out one night with my boyfriend who was drinking and driving, and I always say that should let you know where I was at.
Speaker 1:Sure, I've been there, I get it. I can't there's no, I get it.
Speaker 2:Right, yep. So he was pulled over, he was arrested and when the police officers went to just pull me out of the car to give me a ride home in my impaired state, I went back into a trauma reenactment of a stranger, of a man touching me in a car. And I snapped and so Sure you did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I went into a fight response and this is what has kind of led me down this. This path is. During the assault, I actually did try to fight back. My nervous system went into a fight response, but I was overpowered.
Speaker 2:Um and what we know now from the science of trauma is that trauma is any experience that overwhelms your nervous system's capacity to cope, and when that happens, your nervous system gets trapped in cope. And when that happens, your nervous system gets trapped in the survival responses that it enlisted back then to survive. But you're stuck in the here and now. So during that two-year period, anytime I would drink, I would become very angry, which is not in my nature. I was always considered a very gentle person, very confusing, but that happened that night, and I ended up in a cell with two counts of battery on an officer with injury. Wow, yeah, I remember calling my dad from jail, my parents. My dad picked up the phone and he said we're not bailing you out. If you continue on like this, you you're literally going to kill yourself, and so it was a really hard lesson for me to learn.
Speaker 2:But I sat in that jail cell like the six by eight cell cell. It was just me in like an orange jumpsuit.
Speaker 1:Oh boy.
Speaker 2:Quite literally, but it was in there for the first time that, like I wasn't able to run away or avoid or distract, like there wasn't substances, there wasn't this really crappy relationship, there wasn't anything that I could bury myself in to run away, distract from all of the pain of not just the assault but also traumas that had happened before as well in my life.
Speaker 1:Well, you lost your brother and there's just as we've already said before our conversation here, dominic. Yes, for sure. So early onset, yes, and that's just secondary, because first was really being born and having being put into foster care. Okay, so you have these layers and layers, and layers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all these layers Yep and they start coming out in this jail cell and I had experienced something somatically and in my body that I just wasn't used to. I grew up in an environment where we were really good at like pushing things away or putting it under the rug or pretending like it didn't happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh yeah, let's repress.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Um, let's just shove it right into that amygdala and that subconscious.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, which you know can be helpful for a time and sometimes when, when life is too overwhelming. But, um, just because you're avoiding something doesn't mean that you're processing and healing it, and you got to face it at some point, and so for me it happened in that jail cell. Um, my. Yeah, they experienced trembling and shaking like I'd never experienced before. A lot of emoting, you know, wailing tears.
Speaker 1:that seemed decades old, if that will make sense to my heart lifters. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes, so yeah, it was a really profound experience for me. It kind of startled me, shook me and I was like you know what is going on here, what has happened? And then, after being in that cell, on the third day I went before the judge, who knew who I was for my sexual assault case, and she said, yes, she said we're going to drop the charges, which was great news. And then she said but you need to learn to live with your pain and with your trauma better and that I wrote that down and circled it because I just really want that point to make.
Speaker 1:Whoever's listening take pause, Because I think that's one of the most important messages there are a million but that judge being so pivotal, having known you and then telling you to live with your pain better, Holy cow, what happened inside of you when you heard her say that?
Speaker 2:I think I was intrigued because you know she didn't say you know you need to learn to get over it, get past it, move on, which is what we so often hear. She said yeah, learn to live with it. And that was a concept that I certainly and I had been in and out of therapy for quite some time at that point, and so I think I was trying to like with the death of my brother.
Speaker 2:I was 16 when he passed in a car accident and I remember going to grief counseling and the bereavement centers and all the things and being like the goal was to move past the grief, move on from it, get past it Right, and so, yeah, that was, that was new for me.
Speaker 1:But when I ask her quite not to interrupt. But I mean, once you guys read the book, you'll get the order. But for the sake of this, was that after your college coaches? I think it was your college? You were in a D1 track and field Lacrosse. Oh, that's right, lacrosse. I'm sorry, I knew that, I was just reading. You were sprinting. So then I'm like, yeah, okay, lacrosse, because your brother played lacrosse and he wanted you to. They said to you everybody's got to pass, just get past it, just move on. So that was before.
Speaker 2:This judge said to you oh, that's such a good, that's such a good point that. So the assault happened after I was in college.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So I got, yeah, the incident that happened when I was in college. So for context, yeah. I drank way too much one night. Sure, I actually did 10 shots of vodka in the course of 45 minutes and I ended up in a hospital bed with alcohol poisoning flatlined at the hospital. Yeah, and my lacrosse coaches were not happy because I had stained the image of our team, right you?
Speaker 1:write beautifully about that sad story, about that sad story but one I know very well, sadly. But so there is this timeline, and I think the timeline is so valuable because I know how many of us have a timeline. So I just want everyone listening to, of course read this book with a highlighter and a good amount of time set aside, because this is a guide. This is a book where Brit's blood, sweat and tears have written it to help us do body first healing, so we can all say the things that have been said to us. So you hit this concrete floor and this judge finally says something to you, with some sense of empathy in it, with some sense of real wisdom. She was wonderful.
Speaker 1:Did that set you on the trajectory of? I mean because I don't think you knew about somatic?
Speaker 2:No, it changed everything. I felt like she was giving me encouragement. You know it didn't feel like I was being reprimanded or disciplined by a judge. We felt like, yeah, judged. It felt like encouragement, almost like you can do this kind of thing, and so having that, yeah, it was really helpful, because I was not a big fan of myself at the time and I'm like, wow, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Look at her believing in me. So I'm envisioning in my head the star that I love so much. You know Liv, right, olivia Benson on STD. I mean, I'm just picturing someone like her because I watched that show, just so she will speak in my mind, in my head and my face and go it's okay, it wasn't your fault.
Speaker 2:You know, it's like we all need an inner voice.
Speaker 1:We do, yeah, I need a picture, and she's my picture, like it wasn't your fault, but it was. I would say what?
Speaker 2:was also the turning point with that experience was how I physically, mentally, emotionally felt different after that experience.
Speaker 1:So it's what happened in the jail cell and the wailing, the gnawing, the yeah, the groaning, the gnawing, the groaning. Yeah, I walked out of there feeling different in my body Also help us understand, because you're going to talk a lot about how we feel in our body, which is why I love you, and what did that feel like if?
Speaker 2:you can connect to that with ease. Yeah, I didn't feel as afraid.
Speaker 2:I think that I had felt very disconnected and almost like I was hiding you would see it in my posture, you would see it in my downward gaze, you would see, you could see it in a mirror and when I left there I didn't feel like I was hiding. It's like I felt more expanded. I felt more, much more present in my senses. I like to tell people and I see this sometimes when I work with clients, or I've seen other colleagues when they work with clients is that when we have experiences like this, where we're releasing really intense trauma, the charge of trauma, the residual stress hormones from the past, it can almost feel like you're walking in a new body, like you're Bambi, and it felt like that in some ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's hard to put into words, but I just felt it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so hard to put this into words, yeah, yeah. So bravo, dear one. Bravo because you have put it into words and I try to put it into words when you know in my own life, for sure. But in working with other people it's like, yeah, thank God, now we have this resource in your book body first healing, to be able to hand to people and even walk alongside people. Hopefully there will be groups and communities and all kinds of things happening as a result of this, and you say the body is the missing puzzle piece. So that's where you you are, like you're coming out of this jail cell.
Speaker 2:How metaphorical that is I'm so sorry and not sorry. Yeah, it's very metaphorical and I think oftentimes we talk about how, when we get stuck in survival mode, a lot of the work that we do in working with the body is working in tandem with the nervous system.
Speaker 1:Teach us because you write. I was going to get to that, but we can just jump towards that in the back when you talk about the armor of trauma and these five stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck.
Speaker 1:Because I know a lot of people and I know myself. I'm sure there are areas I'm still stuck. But stuck is it? You're right. It's like boom, I'm stuck. You may not be stuck on the outside, but, like you said, when you got stopped by that cop because of your boyfriend and you got out, he tried to pull you out of the car. You were back and being 20 again.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, you become a prisoner to survival, to survival mode and the whatever armor kept you safe back then it's, it becomes a, you know, a prison of I don't want to say your own making, but your own nervous systems making it is. It's protecting you right.
Speaker 1:Internal family systems is like there are exiles and firefighters and you know that are just trying to keep you going. So you felt different in your body.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And you walk out of there and how do you end up finding somatic healing and what is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so at the time I was working with, uh, you know, just conventional therapists, talk therapist and, um, I think one thing I want to point out you said that there was a missing puzzle piece and I explained the body.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that the body is a part of a larger puzzle right, but this puzzle piece of the body just in and of itself and on its own is also not effective, and so I like to also think of it like a pie.
Speaker 2:Everyone has their own pie when it comes to healing, and all of our pies are made of different slices, which are really the modalities, the frameworks that help our unique brain body. Yes, and so conventional therapy was helpful for a time, but I felt that there was something missing, and so that's where the somatic work came in. I continued to meet with my therapist, but I did tell her about what was going on, and she actually referred me to a therapist who was trained in polyvagal theory. So my work yeah, my work actually started in the polyvagal space. So um did some trainings at the polyvagal Institute, and polyvagal theory is essentially just the upgraded science of the nervous system. Um, it's a. It's a theory in science that was developed by Dr Stephen Porges in the 90s, and then he teamed up with a therapist, deb Dana, and Deb took all of his science and his big words and she translated it into a therapeutic framework.
Speaker 1:She's so beautiful and she gave us glimmers.
Speaker 2:I love her so much. I love the glimmers. Yeah, I love Deb. But they created the Polyvagal Institute together, which is where they train practitioners and therapists in this framework. So, anyways, I started working with a therapist who had been trained in the polyvagal work.
Speaker 1:What is the polyvagal? Just because someone's right now going, I'm probably stopping and looking it up, because I have a very astute audience that loves to learn.
Speaker 2:So the polyvagal theory, which is the upgraded science of the nervous system, porges discovered we could say maybe three founding principles. So the first is that first of all, we don't just have. You know, the old understanding was that we had two states of the nervous system sympathetic and parasympathetic, and we used to think of it like a seesaw or a teeter totter. So parasympathetic is rest and digest, and then we thought sympathetic is fight, flight, freeze. What we now have discovered is that there is this nerve in our body. It's a cranial nerve known as the vagus nerve. It's the longest nerve and vagus means wanderer. So it's called the wandering nerve because it touches every organ and connects to our brain.
Speaker 1:Fascinating right V-A-G-U-S.
Speaker 2:Yes, yep. And so the vagus nerve, though, is often considered the information superhighway of the brain and body, so it sends messages bidirectionally, from the body to the brain and from the brain down to the body. And, by the way, what we know now from the science is that 80% of those messages go from body to brain and only 20% go from brain to body is that 80% of those messages go from body to brain and only 20% go from brain to body.
Speaker 1:That's worth taking a pause and chewing on that, because our gut has what? 500 billion neurons, yes, and our brain has 100 billion as of last count. Yes, that was mind blowing to me.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, yeah. So the nervous system? You know, but the nervous system communicates through this vagus nerve. A lot of the messages are sent there, and what Porges discovered is that the vagus nerve has multiple branches, and two of the branches there's you think of them as pathways, right Little detours or side roads. One of them is the vagal pathway, I'm sorry, the ventral pathway, and then the other one is called the dorsal pathway, and he discovered that the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system has two pathways, ventral and dorsal. And so now, instead of just having two states of parasympathetic and sympathetic, we have three states. So let's think of it now in terms of a ladder. I just really like this imagery because I feel like it's Well, I like that I understand, porges created the polyvagal ladder instead of a seesaw.
Speaker 2:Now it's a ladder and it has three sections. There's the section at the very top which is your ventral state, your rest and digest state. There's then a state in the middle section of the ladder which is your sympathetic state of fight or flight. And then there is a section at the bottom of the ladder which is your dorsal vagal state, parasympathetic dorsal state of shutdown.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. This is so, so liberating. And you know, as you're talking, I'm thinking I knew that he developed all this in 1990. Do you know I had twins in 1990? Yeah, that's. And trauma is so new. Really only two decades or whatever. But when you said that, I went. Oh my word. Yeah, wow, I was carrying not only two child children in my womb, but boy, was I carrying so much trauma. Fascinating to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know how how very grateful I am that we're able to help make a trauma informed world now, which is what your main impetus is trying to do to us. Okay so we have this dorsal Okay.
Speaker 2:So we have this dorsal. Okay, yeah, so the. So all that to say, he discovered that there is not just two States, there's three States.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Digest, fight or flight, which is our sympathetic response, and then there is shutdown, which is kind of like, but it's a little bit different. Think of it as like your hibernation state, your disconnection state, whereas fight or flight is your mobilized state. So what he also realized in his work is that, thinking about that ladder, we go up and down that ladder probably 100 times a day A lot of people yeah, that regulation means staying at the top, and regulation is actually our natural excuse me, biorhythm is to go, just like the window of tolerance.
Speaker 2:We go up and down in our nervous system between activation and deactivation activation deactivation as we face challenges and stress all throughout the day. And so for so many people, this is mind blowing because they're like wait, there are moments when I'm in fight or flight, there are moments when I'm in shutdown yeah, multiple times a day, dozens of times a day, and that's actually normal. So a regulated nervous system is one that we call flexible. It moves fluidly up and down that ladder without getting stuck. A dysregulated nervous system is one that is rigid, one that is stuck down in those states of survival, of fight or flight or shutdown. So that's probably the biggest takeaway from the polyvapor.
Speaker 1:So good? Yeah, because you say very clearly it's not about taking the threats away. They won't go away. Yeah, it's learning to live with them better. Is that how you clarify that?
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, yeah, it's. How can we and you know a lot of people assume that the somatic in in somatic, we in somatics, we talk a lot about this felt sense of safety, right, feeling safe for the first time, oh my, gosh.
Speaker 2:Which is that that ventral state of rest and digest is considered your state of safety and connection. And so, yes, it's about starting to build a bridge to safety and connection. I can feel safe inside my body for the first time. I can feel safe in the world, I can feel safe with others, but it's also creating a greater ability to be with moments where we don't feel safe. A greater ability to be with moments where we don't feel safe create a greater capacity, Because that's going to happen when we are, you know, in conflict with our boss, or, oh, my goodness, there's a car coming and my kid's about to cross the street and I have to grab them you know every or a news story, or you know, my goodness, all the things going on with planes and my daughter's getting on a plane tomorrow with her five month old and she's feeling you know, we don't even understand.
Speaker 1:I like to say we live in a world of overwhelm, but I've been challenged lately on that and so it's like you're telling us. What I'm hearing you say in this work that you do in this current book, is that it's not about always feeling safe. There's no way we'll always feel safe. But is it fair to say that you're telling me I can feel safe inside?
Speaker 2:Yeah absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the greater work to me in what I've done in my own work with clients and in my own life. It's like when you've been born into the world in an unsafe womb. Even my mother's womb wasn't safe, Right, she was dealing with a lot.
Speaker 2:You know your mom either, and so you you come out already like and so you, you come out already Like yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of it is. I would say it's it's maybe not always feeling safe inside, outside between, but having a better, a greater capacity to return to safety.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:To return back up to the, to the top, and I think you know the the world that we live in, where we over-conceptualize everything and we are scared of our feelings and we're also conditioned to not feel our feelings, and our feelings are bad and they're weak and they're dramatic and they're all these things we have made our bodies out to be a very unsafe place to be, and what I always tell people is that just because it's uncomfortable doesn't necessarily mean it's not safe. Right?
Speaker 1:So I differentiate for us. That's really good. I love you Okay.
Speaker 2:So like, just because the clenching in your chest and the bracing in your shoulders and the perspiration from your armpits doesn't feel comfortable and it may be it's anxiety in this moment, or fear that doesn't mean the anxiety or the fear isn't safe. Right, Because when we um and we haven't really gotten into this yet, so I might be jumping- right ahead, no go ahead.
Speaker 2:So when we, um, when we war against the body or push down or suppress emotions, it's, it remains trapped, it remains stuck there, right? So kind of the same thing like we were talking about earlier with with healing just because we're avoiding something doesn't mean it's processed or it's gone or it's healed.
Speaker 2:It just means that we are kicking the can down the road, and I often say it's like a pressure cooker. Anytime we feel an emotional charge or something that doesn't feel comfortable and we don't have the capacity or the ability to move through that experience, to allow it to be felt and expressed what we call discharge from the body and we just push it down, then over time that pressure cooker is going to either explode or implode. And that turns into panic, anxiety, worry rage outbursts, yep, or implode.
Speaker 2:Is shutdown, burnout, fatigue, disease, illness, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:So. Thank you for differentiating that, because it just makes it so, so, very clear. You know, because the old adage, way before Dr Peter Levine and Porges and all of these people, was, you know, don't poke the bear, don't wake the tiger. So now, all of a sudden, with all of this beautiful emergence of information, we're poking the bear and we're waking the tiger, and so we have to do that with such wisdom and delicacy. But I think, for those who are listening, who perhaps, you know, this is awakening them, maybe even triggering. I will put a trigger warning on this. You know where do we start? Okay, you mentioned these five stuck personalities. Why don't you give us that and then maybe give us some hope?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So one thing I think is important to touch on with the stuck personalities and I maybe kind of segueing into this with from the ladder. I keep talking about emotional charge, but I haven't expressed what that is and that's kind of the foundation of somatic experiencing, which is what a lot of this book is about. It's another modality that I'm trained in. So when you come down that nervous system ladder and, by the way, porges and Levine, you probably know this, they're wonderful colleagues, they're friends and their work so beautifully blends together. They actually work together to create-.
Speaker 1:Which is phenomenal, just phenomenal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, their first meeting was back in the 90s, which is-. I'm having twins.
Speaker 1:I'm like help me. Help me, god. What's happening in my life?
Speaker 2:So what happens is that when we're up in our ventral state, at the top of the ladder, okay, what makes us come down is another concept that Porges discovered when his research is the concept called neuroception, which is our ability to our body and our subconscious minds, ability to detect threat without our conscious awareness. So you can always think of it like a security system that's working in the background, subconsciously, and it's scanning am I safe or am I not safe? Am I safe, am I not safe? It's funny. We're sitting here talking about this and literally the piece of paper that I have on my desk says triggers safety, ending with a little security camera. That's fantastic.
Speaker 1:That's from your workbook. It looks like it is yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my daughter ripped it out, so I got it.
Speaker 1:It is yeah. Yeah, my daughter ripped it out, so I got it. How old is she now at this time of taping?
Speaker 2:She is 19 months, 19 months.
Speaker 1:That's the rip in stage.
Speaker 2:It is yeah, she's ripping everything. And your son is Noah's four and a half.
Speaker 1:Oh you are busy. My daughter, oh my gosh, I can't believe. I just said daughter, but I don't know. You could be Sorry, don't take that as an offense. So you're talking to my daughters, who are both raising children at that point. 36 and 34, 38 and 34.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, so we're in the thick of it right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, neuroception, right, the security camera. Am I safe? Am am I not safe? And this happens in three places, and we call it in the polyvagal world inside, outside, between. So do I feel safe internally in my body or, oh my, my viscera is clenching, or my muscles are bracing, or I'm dissociating, and it's not like we're thinking this. It's's that the body is. This is all happening in the background, right? So am I safe inside? Am I safe outside in my environment, or am I safe between me and the other nervous systems around me? So we're always scanning the nervous systems around us as well, for cues of danger, right yeah.
Speaker 1:Some of us more than others, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, some of us more than others. Yes, the prosody in their voice, their eyes, their body language. You know so many things that we are, we are scanning into. So as soon as there is a detection, a neuroceptive cue of danger, that security system says alarm and the alarm turns on the thinking brain, preal cortex, which is our, like the operating center think computer wise that shuts down, the thinking brain, goes offline, so that the survival brain, yeah, flip. So the survival brain, the amygdala, can turn on and take over and keep us protected.
Speaker 2:So the amygdala then initiates this response of hormones down into the body where we have adrenaline and cortisol and all these wonderful survival hormones to mobilize us to fight or flee. So we come down that ladder with adrenaline and cortisol to go into a fight or flight response. If fighting or fleeing is not an option, or we're overpowered, or we override it due to our own uncomfortability of being with anger or anxiety, or we've been conditioned to suppress it then what happens is we then go from fight or flight down into shutdown. However, it's important to note that that adrenaline and cortisol that entered the body up here in the middle ladder at fight or flight, it's still in the body, it's still in the system. It's what we call the stress response cycle, and so what Peter learned through his study of I always get it wrong.
Speaker 2:It's either ethology or ethnology, the study of right, as you're talking about poking the bear, waking the tiger, his book, which was revolutionary, waking the Tiger his study of animals in the wild found that animals are routinely facing threat, they're routinely going into these survival states, yet they don't have traumatic symptoms. Why is that? Why do they have this ability to bounce back? And so, in studying animals in the wild, he found that they do these things with their bodies that humans don't do, and, by the way, we have the same nervous systems as animals in the wild. We're just human animals, right, evolved from animals. So they do things like shaking, yes, yes, so they do things like shaking, trembling, emoting, right.
Speaker 1:Roaring, roaring. You were roaring in that cell.
Speaker 2:yes, Moving rolling right. Moving, yes, and we're saying with dancing. And so what they're doing is they are discharging the adrenaline and cortisol that needs to be released and metabolized from the body.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the keyword metabolized. I love that, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that is that is so crucial, because we can talk about our trauma until we're blue in the face, but if we're not taking the time to be in the body and to allow the emotions, feelings, sensations and impulses of the past that are incomplete, right, that weren't allowed to happen back then because of overwhelm, there wasn't permission to express or whatever that was that's still trapped within ourselves, that's trapped within our nervous system and we're stuck. That's that stuckness that you're talking about. We are stuck in survival mode and a stress response cycle and over time, that adrenaline and cortisol, which is stress hormones, creates chronic stress, which creates mental, emotional, physical health issues.
Speaker 1:What do we do? Yeah, go ahead Wow.
Speaker 2:So the first thing that we do is we have to start to disarm that security system. And it's funny because a lot of people you know they and I think it's just so, so much what we were conditioned to do. And whenever I had a new therapist I'd just immediately want to jump straight into the deep end of this is my trauma. Let me just dump it on you. Let's talk about it, let's move through it.
Speaker 1:Here we go again. Let me just re-traumatize myself. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but what's actually important to note is that when we go into recall and exposure, that just reactivates our amygdala and it makes us more activated and it gets us more stuck in that stress response cycle. It really does, yeah. So the first thing that we have to do is we have to create what we call a felt sense of safety, because the nervous system it doesn't operate through the thinking brain Right, it operates through the feeling brain.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And so the language of the nervous system is feeling, sensation, emotion and impulse, and that's why we can't tell or think our way into regulation, we have to show it. So we first have to start by practicing this consistently, showing our nervous system that safety can be experienced. And these are small things. People are like okay, well, but I don't feel joy in my life, I don't feel love, I don't feel connection. And no, no, no, it's much smaller than that.
Speaker 1:You give us those steps, please.
Speaker 2:I have them here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We sometimes say it's it's, it's stupid simple, it's so stupid simple.
Speaker 1:That was what I would say by the end of my time. And learn, because this is like an abyss of learning. That's the right metaphor? I don't think so. But it's just like more is getting revealed every day. And so by the end of my third term, like it's really just so simple, I want you to go walk in a forest bathing and I want you to breathe these oils and I want you know, and it sounds woo, woo.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, you're, you're affirming that magical.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah I said you're not going to heal by talking anymore. This is a waste of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:At this juncture, when someone's been doing this for years. Yeah, I mean, I said, I know that you think this is woo, woo, woo, woo, but you're affirming that. Okay, so tell us what, what, what are these stupid, simple things?
Speaker 2:So stupid, simple things that you start to do. The first thing that you can start to do is touch in with your sensory motor system. Okay, so the nervous system. Again that scanning we were talking about. It's always scanning in through the senses.
Speaker 1:Am I safe? Am I not?
Speaker 2:Am I safe? Am I not safe? Yeah, and a dysregulated nervous system or one that's stuck in chronic survival mode is one that is. It's a security system that is alarming for danger, even though it might not be there anymore. Yeah, yeah, danger, danger, danger. But we're actually okay. The danger is no longer present, so it's more so. How can I start to use my senses to just notice small moments of safety? And when we say safety, it could be neutral, something that's not activating. So, for instance, I have what can I pick up? I have a cucumber right here. I was snacking on a cucumber, I was snacking on a cucumber. Here's this little cucumber right here. Okay, what I'm about to do is something called kinesthetic orienting. Okay, where we're orienting to something kinesthetically or through tactile touch.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to pull up my, I keep my, my beautiful um nautilus that I get at the Outer Banks.
Speaker 2:Yes, okay, so I got it. So what we can do right now is just start to take time to explore this object in our hands, and you're just going to notice things like what's the weight of it, right? What's the temperature? So this cucumber is still cool, it was in the refrigerator. What's the texture? So, just slowly allowing the fingers to just explore the textures, the grooves, the patterns, the smoothness, and then using your eyes, we can now just explore it with our eyes. So I'm noticing these little yellow dots. It's curious. I'm now seeing the seeds on the inside of the cucumber. Right Now. My mind is already jumping to like, oh, where were you in the ground? And now I'm thinking about nature, right? So, yeah, it just took me right into imagery pathway went right there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but this is just a small way and I already feel, um, if I were to watch this recording back, I feel like my shoulders have actually dropped down a little bit.
Speaker 1:I've settled I have.
Speaker 2:I feel like my belly is a little bit more expanded, like I have a bully, a full belly now.
Speaker 1:Got to take a breath which is not easy to come by for me.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And not.
Speaker 2:So what we're doing is we are essentially by leaning into the senses. It is such a wonderful way to slow down the system, yeah, or what I like to say, to catch up to the present, because we're so stuck in the past yeah.
Speaker 1:Some people call that mindfulness.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, but you're, but we're doing it. Yeah, so it could be mindfulness, but being done through the body, and the senses and touching something.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay.
Speaker 2:But the important part is, you know, as we're doing, what we're doing right now is we call it exploratory orienting. So we're exploring with our senses the space around us, noticing like, oh, the shades of this. I actually never noticed this ifs workbook I have has like a loaded. There's like flowers behind it.
Speaker 1:I'm just now time so this is five, four, three, two, one like if, like if we use five things we see four things we see. Okay, love that All right. This is fantastic.
Speaker 2:And I think I listed that in the book as one. But the next step to bring somatic awareness is you're then going to do something called. So you're taking cues of neuroception that feel safe what are my safety cues? And then you're turning it inside. So then you're doing now something called interoception, where you start to track the body and essentially ask the question how is my body showing me right now that this feels safe, that this feels good? So I was tracking, like oh, I'm noticing, I feel like my shoulder diaphragm dropped, my belly kind of expanded out. I noticed there were some deeper breaths that I took.
Speaker 1:Not punching my jaw.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so what we're doing is, by bringing a conscious awareness to our unconscious somatic experience, we're creating, like these new neural networks in the brain of like, look, I can experience safety for a moment. And it's this experience which create this somatic experience, which creates evidence, new evidence for the nervous system that, hey, we can be safe. And over time, when we've done that consistently, like here's the experience, here's the evidence that starts to create new expectation, subconscious expectation of I can expect that I'm going to be okay, right, rather than bracing rather than running away, rather than shutting down and collapsing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's really the first step. You know this this book, body first healing is based on a program that I created.
Speaker 1:Tell us about that if you would, because keeping my eye on the time for you, yeah, a lot, lot to say to a lot more people.
Speaker 2:And, like I said, I know be to hang the program I started. I created back in 2018. But I like to say it's like a one stop shop shop for all of, for many slices of the healing pie. So we explore polyvagal theory, somatic work and somatic healing through somatic experiencing, somatic attachment work and somatic internal family systems.
Speaker 1:We are not going to be able to touch that, but attachment is a huge part of what I do here, and so we do have a lot of knowledge, but we don't have the somatic attachment. So you're going to have to get Brit's book and maybe I'll add some things in later and teach from it. But okay, keep going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a whole chapter for you, but there is, it's fabulous. But what I wanted to mention about the program is that the program follows the same about the program is that the program follows the same pace that we follow and that we guide our clients into in somatic experiencing, which is this pace of titration blowing down the nervous system. Um, titration is a term that was borrowed from chemistry by Peter Levine for somatic experiencing, and a titration dropper is a drop. One drop, yeah, into another chemical solution, chemical compound, and there's a drop and it fizzles and then it settles. There's a small reaction. Another drop, fizzle, settle, fizzle, settle. It's titrated, it's gentle, it's not overwhelming, it's not going to overflow, there's not going to be this big reaction. The nervous system is the same. When you work with the nervous system in a very slow and gentle way, you actually move much quicker. When you work too quickly, you could actually further stress the nervous system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I understand that and that became very much a part of my own awareness of like I think at times therapists can do more harm. And we have vowed to do no harm, yeah, and so when you're working with trauma clients, it's, it's critical, it's really critical, to understand titration.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I learned that the hard way.
Speaker 1:I would love for you to repeat that, just because I feel like that is the essence of what I've learned from you that slower is better, slower is safer to slower is safer, but it actually helps you move along more quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Peter says that slower is faster when it comes to nervous system and somatic healing and I see this all the time and the reason I was bringing that up is because I said, the reason we start with the foundation of safety, building this felt sense of safety in my program it's a six month program we actually don't even get into core wounds and trauma work until month three.
Speaker 2:And people are very like what when they get started? When are we getting into it? Yeah, exactly, and that's why I was saying you know, for most of us we want to get right into the deep work. Someone would be better tomorrow.
Speaker 1:And it's not that kind of work. There's no way with your life and your story that it could have been quick.
Speaker 2:So the reason that we move slower and I like to use the analogy of a pool, we're used to being thrown into the deep end, what we call, in somatic experiencing, the trauma vortex, but that just activates us more, right, might do more harm than good. Yep, you go into the shallow window and you kind of dip your toes in to not the trauma vortex, but even think about a vortex like a tornado. We don't go straight to the middle, where the centrifugal force is. We work the outer edges. You'll hear an SE practitioner say this all the time we're just going to work the edges today, okay. And what they mean is like, instead of getting into yeah, instead of getting right into the things that you're most anxious about, like that medical anxiety let's maybe talk about a moment recently where you just felt a little anxious about something not related, right. And so we start with just smaller, more titrated moments.
Speaker 2:We track the system. And, as you're telling me about that anxious moment, what do we notice in the body right now? Well, I'm noticing this, I'm noticing that. Is that tolerable? Can we be with it for a moment? Okay, yeah, and then we're with it, and then what we do is we now pendulate. So in somatic experiencing, we practice pendulation where we go back and forth between activation and now deactivation, so that might look like let's do some resourcing for a moment and let's orient. Let's pick up that cucumber. What are you?
Speaker 1:noticing.
Speaker 2:Oh, now I feel a little bit more grounded. I feel like that heat is kind of dissipating. It went from a level 10 intensity to a level four Great, and we just be with that for a minute. So we are again, and then we dip back into the anxiety and then we dip back out as needed. So we're building tolerance, tolerance. Exactly. We are widening the window of tolerance and building a client's capacity to be with what's not safe, what doesn't feel good.
Speaker 1:So if someone were to say to me or to you, just to give an example, yeah, I don't know today, I'm just feeling, I don't know, I'm all out of sorts, I just don't know why I'm feeling this way, I'm, I'm just don't know, yeah. And I say to that person well, how do you feel in your body? Is that a good thing to say?
Speaker 2:second, yeah, so you could say how do you feel in your body or how is your body showing you you're out of sorts right now and it's kind of, yeah, kind of the the the same thing. But even as you're saying that right now, I noticed that you were rocking. I started rocking Right. So it's like I'm just feeling out of sorts. I'm feeling, you know, discombobulated all over the place, that sounds soothing, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Or another question is and as you say that, what do you notice? And so sometimes it might not be. And when we talk about feelings, feelings can be. There's different channels of feelings, right. So for for some people, it's well, I feel anxious, or I just feel frustrated. So they're good at really naming affect and emotion, yeah, but maybe they can't, they don't know what the sensation is, right, Okay. And as you say that, anger, what, like what? What do you sense in your body? Well, I don't know, Right. And for some other people they're like well, I don't know how I feel, but I know, like I don't know what emotions coming up, but I just noticed that, like there's a lot of constriction, like right here in this part, yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a heaviness, have the emotional language, but they have the sensorial language and for some people it's that there is a behavior and impulse that the body is doing. So for you, even for me as the practitioner, it's like okay, I'm noticing what you're doing.
Speaker 1:That's so funny. I didn't even I know, until I tell you.
Speaker 2:I'm like, oh God, I am, I'm such a mover, I have to move, yeah, yeah. Somatic experiencing practitioners are really trained to like, observe people like animals in the wild, so I can notice when someone's heart is racing from you know, like I'm trained to like notice the neck, or notice coloration biting the lip, or when there's a change in posture, the smallest changes in one of the diaphragms, the body is always showing us and telling us a story of our history.
Speaker 1:I know and it's really unnerving, go ahead. I'm sorry it's unnerving to, but it's. I think that's something that people have to be aware of it. It maybe is the first time in your whole entire life that you've been in a space where your body is safe to feel it, and that's really what you're telling us?
Speaker 1:Get into that person place, work therapist course right, because I so want to experience what that feels like I'm 65. Yeah, and I don't want to waste one more day of my life hiding from it or numbing it, and that's a huge yes to say.
Speaker 1:So, to the person like myself. Thank you for sharing that. Well, you're welcome. You know it's hard to sit with someone like you, britt, who because that's what people think about me If I'm their therapist or their coach, you know, they're always saying you just made me so uncomfortable and I'm like, oh gosh, okay, I'm not gonna take that personal, you know. You know, but that's I'm. I have that gift and I sometimes it's a curse, but for the most part it's a gift, and I see that with you and if you can lean into the discomfort, you're going to get free. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And you did your work. I probably are still doing work, I would assume to continue to be free. And being free I say freedom is really hard. Being happy is very hard when you don't know, and for me the challenge now is feeling at ease. It's hard to feel at ease when your nervous system has never known that feeling. Yeah, it's like you have to teach it that way, I don't think it's like I think you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you absolutely do, and I and I it says this in the book and I say it all the time. Clients cause they're like Brittany, this, this tracking thing, this glimmer thing. Yeah, you absolutely do, and I, and it says this in the book and I say it all the time. Clients because they're like Brittany, this, this tracking thing, this glimmer thing, this you know resourcing thing, it's so hard, like I, I don't know what my body is telling me. What do you mean?
Speaker 1:It's funny, but it's so not funny. It's so true. I've watched people experience peace and go. I don't know what this feeling is. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what it is. What is it? I think it's peace, yeah Well. I don't like it. It's very uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:Well, and that's why in my not just in the book, but in the body first healing program and in the workbook, there's a whole, and this comes from the somatic experiencing- manual manual Okay. Yeah, meaning. Uh, yes, training, thank you. Um, you were supposed to give everyone that you work with a vocabulary of sensations.
Speaker 1:Perfect.
Speaker 2:So that's that wasn't just made up by me. That comes from somatic experiencing.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:When you get a vocabulary, I mean like, think about it. It's like when we're learning new words when we're kids, right, Like, oh, I have a quiz today.
Speaker 1:Well, you have one that's learning new words, and how does that feel, watching your daughter Like it's? Got to be fascinatingly one I heal through so much of watching my children you know so.
Speaker 1:I still am, but they're all grown. So okay, britt, we have to close this. Yes, people are going to read this book. What is this? There's just so much to this. You simplify it in an extraordinary way through your own pain and agony. Thank you for living through that and for pressing through to this beautiful place where you are today. First place to start is what you said take an object or just.
Speaker 2:Yeah, starting to find ways. We call it resourcing, so finding ways to feel a sense of betterness, okayness, presence, connection. You know you can do that with a dog and as you're petting yeah, petting your pet and just noticing how their fur feels, and then how do I feel in my body? What am I noticing? And I didn't? I didn't get to this, but I do want to say it just really, really, really quickly. The reason.
Speaker 2:I get kind of caught in these little spider webs of thoughts.
Speaker 2:But well, because you're brilliant, thank you.
Speaker 2:The reason that Peter says that slower is actually faster is because when you start to learn that felt sense of safety OK, I mentioned earlier that we do this something called this, one thing called pendulation, where we dip into activation and then back out.
Speaker 2:And if you all could see me right now, I'm making the sign of like a grandfather clock going back and forth, back and forth. And when we are just stuck in activation and survival mode, you can think like it's like my grandfather clock is broken, it doesn't know how to dip back over into safety, right, and what we do is we gently start to nudge it like, hey, here's a moment of safety, okay, now come back. Here's a moment of safety, now come back. But we always say that the deeper that you can experience presence, connection, a sense of safety in the body, the deeper that you can swing that pendulum into deactivation, the deeper it swings over into activation. But it feels tolerable because you know that there's this safe haven to do it, and so that's the remarkable thing about this work is that it moves through so much but it feels gentle. We always say, it should always feel gentle, never overwhelming.
Speaker 2:I really love that, yeah, and so that's why the safety is so important, building this felt sense of safety, because it actually helps you to do the work in a deeper way, but a much more supportive, sustainable way.
Speaker 1:Can you give me two minutes, just two minutes, because I am focusing this year for mamas and mothers and matriarchs and anyone in the mothering world. How have you, as a mother, do you see the affect of all of your work? And I would think it would bring I know for myself it just brought, it brings so much gratitude, even with adult children and now with my grandchildren. I can see the affect of the training and, as you so wisely have said over and over again, the day to day practice of these tools and principles that you're giving us. Are you experiencing a deep inner joy that, good girl, you did the work I am, I am, I can see, girl, you did the work, I am.
Speaker 1:I am. I can see it on your face. Yeah, I am.
Speaker 2:No, it's, and I don't want to make it seem like it's not easy. I I fell in love with motherhood and I was really surprised by it. Yeah, I waited until my 30s to have kids and I loved, loved it so much that now I'm like I'm gonna be home. Actually, it's funny because I got an email right before you and I got on saying, um, that the school that I applied my little Noah for for kindergarten next year it's a hybrid school of homeschooling and then in person perfect, I did that for homeschooled for 14 years, okay.
Speaker 1:good. He was accepted, so we were waiting. So I was like I'm going to be a homeschool mom. So yes, you are, I'm here for you if you need me. Oh my gosh that's so fun.
Speaker 2:So I have completely fallen in love with motherhood. But it has not been. It hasn't always been easy and there are certainly where I see the. The way that my parents attuned to me sometimes turns into the way that I attuned to my kids and but yeah, this work absolutely, I feel like, is I feel like it's foundational for parenting. I think it is yeah To know the science behind the nervous system.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Yeah to know the how the brain develops, how we move through emotions. You know, and also considering to that your nervous system as an adult sets the standard for your how your kiddos nervous systems develop. I mean, their nervous system literally borrows yours for the first six years of life, Mirror neurons.
Speaker 1:Baby, I know I'm. I taught women a long time. For 20 years I've been teaching decades of women, right Mothers, and when I say stuff like that, they go oh God, I'm screwed, you know, it's like I don't know, but you need terrifying when you think of it that way.
Speaker 1:Well, because I know I could have said it better. Terrifying when you think of it that way. Well, because I know I could have said it better, but I know I've learned. Yeah, I. But I tell my own daughter's, daughter in law, son, you know, it's like you've got to have this information. So everybody has to get this book and hand it out at baby showers and wedding showers, because it will help your marriage and it will help your life in general. We all need to understand I have now concluded that everything in life boils down to our nervous system. Period Isn't it wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this one little thing has been there all along.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's there. Yeah, through our evolution as a creature, you know the one thing that has helped us to survive through millennia of challenges and horrible things it's incredibly resilient when you think about how it's adapted.
Speaker 1:Well, weren't you so resilient and high functioning.
Speaker 2:Thank God, I'm so thankful that you know, the one thing I will say is that somatic experiencing I had mentioned that it's a naturalistic approach to trauma recovery. Naturalistic, peter, put that in there strategically, because it brings us back to our own human nature, yeah, our primal roots, the way that we were so wonderfully brilliantly designed to self heal. You know we are self healing, self regenerating creatures. If we just give ourselves the chance and give our body the chance to move through hard moments, it'll really surprise us what it can do. So we have all the answers. Sometimes we just don't know how to find them.
Speaker 1:Our bodies are regenerative and we have hope. You are giving us so much hope. Thank you so much for being an illuminator and being someone that is sharing wisdom. I appreciate it. Oh, heartlifters, I told you this is a masterclass condensed for us into one hour 60 minutes of wisdom, hard earned wisdom that we can apply and activate in our lives today. I have pages of notes and I have followed Britt for a very long time, but this new book, body First Healing, is a must.
Speaker 1:If you yourself have not experienced trauma, praise be to God, but we will all know someone in our lifetime who has, and so I want all of us to be trauma informed at least and, if you feel so inclined, trauma trained. For more information, go to traumahealingorg or visit Brit's site bodyfirsthealingcom and be sure to meet me over on sub stack at heart lift central. All you have to do is put at heart lift central in your Google search and you will find your way there. If you have any problems, please, please, contact me. Until next time, heartlifter, remember you have value, worth and dignity, and I encourage you to go Heartlift someone today. Yeah, go make someone's day.
