BONUS EPI: Somatic And Mindset Tools For Body Anger After Sexual Trauma

I share grounded, real-world techniques to soften body rage and body shame after sexual trauma, with a focus on moving slowly and staying safe in your nervous system. We walk through somatic tools, parts work, and practical therapy skills that help you shift from fighting your body to rebuilding trust with it. 

• somatic healing basics and why the body holds trauma 
• pendulation practice to move between activation and resource 
• titration for small doses instead of flooding 
• orienting for dissociation and present-moment grounding 
• shaking and tremoring to discharge stress activation 
• building a safe sensory toolkit for regulation 
• parts work and IFS framing of rage as protection 
• questions for shame and bringing self-energy to the body 
• DBT radical acceptance for ending the reality fight 
• TIPP skills for high-intensity moments 
• opposite action in gentle doses for body avoidance 
• CPT stuck points and questions to test trauma beliefs 

Work With Me Individually

I offer trauma-informed therapy for high-achieving women navigating:

• Complex trauma
• Late-diagnosed ADHD or autism
• Nervous system dysregulation
• Relational pattern healing

If you’d prefer one-on-one support, book a free 15-minute consultation here:
http://linktr.ee/EmpoweringWellnessHub

Good Music for Healing

🎵 **Divine Woman Playlist (Apple Music):** https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/divine-woman/pl.u-leyl096uMoD885j

Episodes Mentioned in this Episode

When Your Body Feels Like The Enemy After Sexual Trauma

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/19285299-when-your-body-feels-like-the-enemy-after-sexual-trauma

You’re not alone. 

We’re healing together.

Transcript

Welcome And How To Use This

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey, hey, welcome back to The Awaken Heart, a podcast for healing women. This is the bonus episode that pairs with this week's main episode of anger at your body after experiencing sexual trauma. If you're here, that means you're looking for more. And I want you to notice what that means, that you're ready to do the actual work, not just understand the body rage, but to move, to move it, start to tend to it, start to shift the relationship with the body. And that takes courage, especially when the relationship we're tending to this is with our own bodies, which for a lot of us has been a sight of pain for a very long time. So we're gonna go through some specific real life healing techniques across several modalities. And we're gonna take, I want you to take what's useful, leave what isn't, go slowly, because there is no rush year. But it's the bonus episode. Thanks for being here. And let's dive right on in. If you before we dive, if you have not listened to this week's episode, I will link it in the show notes. If you have not listened to season two, the whole beginning to moving to right now as far as processing and healing after sexual trauma, please go back to season two, episode one, and catch up because we go through the numb season. Right now we're in the rage arc. And yeah, let's dive in.

Somatic Skills To Move Rage

SPEAKER_01 1:33

So, first off, somatic techniques, right? Somatic work is body-based healing. It works on the premise that trauma is stored in the body, not just in memory and in narrative, and that that healing happen has to happen in the body, not just in the mind. So, like it's kind of like if you've been through talk therapy for years, but you feel you've processed things, everything's been processed cognitively, but something still isn't shifting. Somatic work is often why. The body holds what the mind has already worked through and it needs its own tending. So, first up is pendulation. It's one of the foundational concepts in somatic experiencing. The idea is simple but powerful. Instead of going fully into the activated charge state, the fear, the rage, the overwhelm, you practice moving between activation and resource. You touch the edge of the difficult feeling, you notice what it feels like in your body, and then you pendulate back to something that feels okay: a resource, a place of relative safety, a neutral sensation. Because many of us have an all-or-nothing relationship with difficult emotions when we're we're either flooded or we're shutting down. Pendulation teaches the nervous system a third option. I can approach this feeling without being consumed by it. I can come and go. So here, let's let's take a practice. Bring to mind something mildly activating about your body.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Notice where you feel it. Notice the quality of the sensation. Is it tight? Heavy, hot. Let yourself feel it for just a moment.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

Then I want you to shift your attention to something in your environment that feels neutral or safe. The weight of your body in the chair, a color in the room, the temperature of the air.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

For me, right now, what would be my iced coffee? Stay there for a few breaths.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Then only if you choose to, you can return to the difficult sensation and then pendulate out again with finding something soothing. This is not avoidance. This is teaching your nervous system that it can regulate, that it has options. Titration. Titration means working with small doses, not flooding, not trying to process everything at once. When you titrate, you approach the difficult material in small amounts, like adding one drop of a substance to water, watching how it disperses before adding another drop. For body work, this might look like spending two minutes with your hand on your heart, not trying to feel anything, just two minutes, then stopping, and then coming back tomorrow for two more minutes. And this is really especially important for those who hyperfocus. The urge can be to go all in, process everything, figure it all out in one session. Titration asks us to trust the slow pace, to believe that the small and consistent acts are more healing than big and overwhelming acts. Next up somatically is orienting. Orienting is a deceptively simple practice. It is extraordinarily effective for dissociation and for coming back into the present body. Basically, when you orient, you slowly look around your environment. You take in what's there, you name what you see, either out loud or internally. You let your eyes move naturally. You're not scanning for threat, but taking in the scene with genuine curiosity. This acts this acts as that. This activates the social engagement system, the parasympathetic nervous system. It signals to your body, hey, I'm here. I'm safe enough right now, I can look around. So let's practice.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Slowly look around wherever you are right now. Notice five things you can see. Name them. Notice the light. Notice the textures. Let your eyes rest on something that feels neutral or pleasant. And then I want you to take a breath. Feel the surface beneath you wherever you are.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

This is a grounding tool you can use anywhere, anytime. In a doctor's office, before a difficult conversation, while you're driving, when you feel yourself starting to float away. Ground yourself. Orient yourself to your present moment. And then we have shaking and tremoring. This is huge and somatic work. Animals in the wild, after escaping a threat, shake. They tremor and then they go back to grazing. They discharge the activation and return to baseline. Humans learn to suppress this discharge. We hold still, we hold it in. We tell ourselves to calm down, stop shaking, get it together. But the shaking is the completion. It's the nervous system releasing what it mobilized for the threat. So an intentional shaking practice. Stand with your feet about hip width apart. Bend your knees slightly. I just want you to begin to bounce gently.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Just a small up and down movement. Let it become a shake. Let it move through your legs. Your hips. Your torso.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Let your arms hang loose. Let the shake be messy. Shake it out. Be all messy. Let it be ugly. Even though it's not ugly. Just let it be whatever it is. Stay with it for two to five minutes. So we're gonna shake here for a second. I'm not gonna stay the whole two to five, but I want you to get some sort of shaking. Shake it, shake your hands, shake your arms, wiggle a leg, wiggle a foot, bounce up and down, shake some stuff, and then slow it down.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Slow it down. Stand still. Notice. Is there anything different?

SPEAKER_01 9:14

It can feel strange, especially the first few times. But it might bring up emotion. Let it. That's what discharging, that's the discharge working. And then the last somatic recommendation I have is grounding through the senses for dissociation. When you're dissociating, when you're drifted out of your body, when you can't locate yourself, the path back is through the senses. Safe, chosen, controlled sensory input. Cold water on your wrist, the texture of something rough or soft under your fingers, a strong smell. So some essential oils, some centrus cement, maybe some coffee. You can stomp your feet against the floor, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Humming, which activates the vagus nerve directly, is very beautiful. Hum a song. But the key here is safety. These are not about shock or pain or discomfort. This is about inviting yourself to come back. There's something here to feel, and that's okay. It's okay here. But build your own sensory toolkit. Identify three or four sensory inputs that work specifically for your nervous system. Test them when you're already regulated so you know what works before you need it. So this could be a weighted stuffy. This could be a weighted blanket. This could be fidgets. This could be an ice pack. This could be an eye mask. This could be one of those heated shoulder weighted relax your neck and shoulder things. This could be a cold shower. This could be a hot bath. Like build up your sensory toolkit to help you when you have moments of dissociation.

Parts Work For Shame And Protection

SPEAKER_01 11:13

So second part is parts work for body shame and rage. Parts work comes primarily from internal family systems therapy. The basic premise is that we are not a single unified self. We're a system of parts, each with their own rules. Sorry, each with their own roles, their own histories, their own protective strategies. For healing, body, shame, and rage, parts work is incredibly useful because it lets us get curious about the different relationships we're holding toward our body instead of just being inside of them. There is a part of you that is enraged at your body that says you froze, you didn't fight back, you responded when you shouldn't have, you got sick, you changed, you failed me. In parts work, we don't try to silence that part or talk it out of its rage. We get curious about it. So ask yourself, ask the part.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

What are you afraid of would happen if you stopped? Because often the part that's furious at the body is trying to protect you.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

It thinks that if it can make the body different, i.e., smaller, better, more controlled, less visible, you'll be safe. It's working incredibly hard on your behalf. It just has bad information about what actually creates safety. There is a part that left during the trauma that checked out that went somewhere safer. That part doesn't need your anger, it needs your gratitude. See how it feels. That part made a decision in real time under extraordinary circumstances that allowed you to survive something unsurvivable. It was not abandoning you. It was the most sophisticated protection it could offer. You don't have to keep leaving every time things get hard. You can stay now. I can handle it now. The shame part often goes hand in hand with the body rage. It says, What happened means something terrible about you? Your body's response means something terrible about you. Who you are in this body is something to be hidden. And I want you to ask that shame part: who taught you this? Who told you that what happened to this body reflects something wrong with the person inside it? Who told you that what happened to this body reflects something wrong with the person inside it? Because that belief came from somewhere, it was installed, and it can be examined. In IFS, there is a concept of the self, the calm, curious, compassionate core that is not any of the parts, but can witness all of them. The invitation in body work is to bring self-energy into the relationship with your body. Not the furious part, not the ashamed part, not the part that that's been running an improvement project since you were a teenager, but the curious, compassionate self who can look at this body and say, I see you, I'm here, what do you need? The shift from parts running the relationship to self-leading is where the real healing happens.

DBT Tools For Intense Emotion

SPEAKER_01 15:24

Next up, I've got some dialectical behavior therapy, DBT. It offers some of the most practical, accessible tools for working with intense emotions. And body rage and shame are intense emotions. First up is radical acceptance. It is one of the cornerstones of DBT and is almost always misunderstood. Radical acceptance does not mean you approve of what happened. It does not mean you like it. It does not mean you think it's okay or that you stop wanting things to change. Radical acceptance means this is what it is. Right now, this is what's true. Fighting reality doesn't change reality, it only adds suffering on top of suffering. So apply to the body, radical acceptance might sound something like this is my body right now. This is what it looks like. This is what it's doing. This is what it's been through. I don't have to like it. I don't have to be happy about it. But fighting what's actually true is costing me energy I don't have. This is not resignation. This is the beginning of actually being in a relationship, a real relationship with what is instead of a constant argument with it. Next up are tip skills. I use this a lot for people with heightened emotions. TIPP. P is in pickle. T I P P. This is for a skill for moments when emotional intensity is so high that other skills aren't accessible. First off, T, temperature change. Cold water on your face activates the dive reflex, which immediately slows the heart rate and calms the nervous system. Cold water on the wrist, holding some ice, splashing some cold water on your face. This is biology, not willpower. Two, eye, intense exercise, brief, intense physical movements, 60 seconds of running in place, jumping jacks, anything that moves the body hard. It burns off the physiological activation of intense emotions. It completes the stress cycle. The first P, third up, paced breathing. Long exhales that are longer than your inhales. The longer the exhale, the more it activates your parasympathetic nervous system. I don't want to say it like that. That's misleading. When your exhale is longer than your inhale, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. So you can breathe in for like four counts and out for six to eight because the exhale is the key. And you want to do this for two to five minutes. Exhale longer than the inhale. And then the last P is progressive muscle relaxation. Systemically tensing and releasing muscle groups throughout the body. Start at your feet and work upwards. You want to tense your feet for five seconds and then release. Tense your ankles for five seconds and release. Tense your calves and shins for five seconds and release. Do the knee, the thighs, the pelvic area, the bum, the torso, the back, the arms, the fists, the shoulders, the neck, the face. And then when you do all the body parts one by one, after you do that, tense everything up for five or ten seconds and then let it melt. This can be easier when you're doing lying down, but feel free to do it standing up or seated. But that final melt can feel real good lying down or in a chair. And then, so that's tip skills, T-I-P-P. Get you hold, get hold of some of them tip skills, girl, because they are helpful. They can help you calm down and heighten moments. And then lastly, about DP DBT is opposite action for body avoidance. So DBT's opposite action skill asks, what does the emotion tell you to do? And then it asks you to consider doing the opposite. So body shame and body rage often say avoid, don't look, don't touch, don't acknowledge, stay away from this. And the opposite action, when applied gently, applied in small doses, is turning inward, looking, touching, acknowledging. So you would take that titration and the opposite action and give yourself little doses of the opposite action, which are little doses of goodness and love. This doesn't mean forcing yourself into something that doesn't feel safe. It means finding the smallest possible version of turning inward and doing that. Hand on your heart for 30 seconds, looking at your hands, noticing your feet on the floor. Small, safe, chosen. That's opposite action for body avoidance.

CPT Questions For Stuck Beliefs

SPEAKER_01 21:04

And then one of my favorites next up is CPT. These are very little glimpses into these theories. There's so much more to these theories, but I want to introduce you to some modalities that are beneficial for healing, especially when we are so heightened after sexual trauma. So cognitive processing therapy is a trauma-focused therapy that works specifically with what is called stuck points. Stuck points are beliefs that formed as a result of trauma that are keeping you from processing it and moving through it. For body based trauma, the stuck points are usually some of the most entrenched beliefs we carry. So my body betrayed me, my body is disgusting, my body is not mine, my body's response during the assault means it was partly my fault. Body is something to be managed and controlled, not trusted. If my body looked different, then this wouldn't have happened. These beliefs feel like facts. They have felt like facts for a long time, but they are beliefs formed in response to something that happened, not inherent truths about you or your body. So CPT offers a set of questions to gently examine a stuck point. You don't use all of them at once. So pick one or two that feel most relevant. Here they are. What is the evidence for this belief? What is the evidence against it? I use this one a lot. Some of my clients are even like, they will bring up the evidence or the lack of evidence. It's just really good at changing some thoughts. So what's the evidence to support the belief? What's the evidence to dispute the belief? Most of the time, evidence disputes it. Next question. Is there another way to understand what happened? Is there another way to see how this happened?

SPEAKER_00 23:13

What would I say to someone I cared about who held this belief about their body? Is this belief based on all the facts or only some of them?

SPEAKER_01 23:27

Are all the facts included? Does holding this belief help me or harm me? Is it useful? Is it helpful? Or is it harmful? This is not about talking yourself out of your experience. It's about examining whether the meaning you've made from it is the only possible meaning. CPT uses impact statements to help process what happened and what it has, what it has meant. A body specific impact statement, ask, what has the body rage cost you? What has the body shame cost you? What has the war with your body cost you in energy and relationships and choices you've made and experiences you've avoided in years of your life? I want you to write this. Don't edit it. Let it be the full accounting. What has your body rage and body shame cost you? What has this war with your body cost you? And then only when you're ready, only when it feels like you can hold it, write what you want your relationship with your body to look like. Not what you think it should look like, but what you actually want. And that gap between where you are and where you want to be, that's the work. And naming it is the first step.

Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness Options

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Going to something more prevalent is mindfulness practices. Standard mindfulness instruction often says bring your attention to your body, notice what's there, stay present. But for us trauma survivors, that instruction can be activating. Coming into the body can feel like coming into a danger zone. And so I want to offer mindfulness practices that are adapted, that have safety and choice built in. The standard body scan moves through the body systemically, spending time with each area. The trauma-sensitive version includes choices you don't get in the standard version. You can skip any body part. If your attention reaches an area that doesn't feel safe, you simply move on. You don't have to go there. You can open your eyes at any point. You don't have to stay in the dark with any of this. You can stop at any time, and that is not failure, that is self-care. And you can stay in safe areas. If your feet feel okay, you can spend the entire time with your feet. That's a complete and valid practice. So when mindfulness body scans, that's just about scanning your body and acknowledging the tension or acknowledging what's going on without changing it, judging it, or doing anything with it. Just acknowledgement, just awareness. So if you want to do a mindfulness body scan, but certain parts are too heavy, stay with the parts that are safe. Stop at any time, open your eyes at any time, and just stay safe with yourself. There's a noting practice in mindfulness where you label experiences with single words or short phrases without building a narrative around them. Apply to body sensations. It sounds like tightness, warmth, heaviness, tingling, pressure. You just want the sensation, not the story about the sensation. You don't want to say there's tightness in my chest, and that's because I'm broken and my body is never going to heal, and I'm going to feel this way forever. You simply just witness the tightness. So just note the experience in a single word or short phrase. This creates a small but significant distance between you and the sensation. You're observing it, not being consumed by it. And for many of us, that's genuinely new. And then you have your loving-kindness meditation when it comes to mindfulness meditation. Traditional loving kindness meditation asks you to offer warmth and care to yourself, to others, to difficult people, to all being. For survivors with body shame, starting with the whole body can be too much. So start with a neutral body part, not a part that carries pain or shame. Your left pinky finger, your earlobes, the top of your head, your eyebrows, your chin, your knees. Start with a neutral body part. Offer that neutral part something simple. May you be at ease. May you rest. That's it. That's the whole practice. Over time, weeks and months, you can slowly extend that offering to other parts. You don't have to rush toward the parts that carry the most pain.

SPEAKER_00 28:33

You work at the edges gently until the circle widens on its own.

Reclaiming Body Autonomy And Language

SPEAKER_01 28:45

So, like the last piece, and I think is really an underrated one when it comes to trauma recovery, and that is, and it's the one that for me personally had the most significance. Reclaiming or simply claiming my body as my own, completely thirst before anyone else's access or gaze or agenda is a healing process. Putting it first without the worry of gazes or agendas or other people's access. That might look like deciding who is and isn't allowed to touch your body, not as a rule you follow, but as an authority you actually feel. Maybe it's deciding that your body does not exist for other people's comfort, desire, or assessment. Maybe it's deciding that you will not subject your body to things it doesn't want in order to keep peace or manage other people's feelings. Hello, obligatory sex or obligatory hugs or obligatory kisses. And that's not consent. Don't fucking do it. And for some, it might be deciding to step back from sexual intimacy entirely for as long as you need without apology or time or a timeline. Choosing celibacy or sexual abstinence as a healing practice is not damage. It's not avoidance. When it's a chosen intentional decision made from self-knowledge, it's healthy.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

It's self-care.

SPEAKER_01 30:23

It is deciding that you are going to know what your body feels like when it is completely yours before you share it with anyone else. There is no correct timeline for this. There is no point at which you're supposed to be ready. Your body, your choice, your timeline, fool fucking stop. The language we use internally about our bodies matters. Not because positive thinking heals trauma, but because language shapes the quality of the relationship. So you want to shift from going from my body failed me toward my body did what it could do with what it had. You want to go from why won't my body cooperate toward what is my body trying to tell me right now? You want to go from I hate how I look toward I'm in a hard season with my body and that's allowed. Maybe go from my body is broken toward something more like my body is still healing from something it shouldn't have had to carry. And lastly, but not the least important, when you say what's wrong with me, change that to what happened to me. It's one of the most significant language shifts in trauma recovery to ask what happened to me instead of what's wrong with me. It moves from pathology to experience, from inherent defect to acquired wound. It goes from this is who I am to this is something that happened, and my body and mind responded, and that response makes complete sense. And I encourage you to do it anyway. Write a letter to your body, not a letter about how you're trying to accept it or love it, a real complicated letter. Tell it what you've been angry about, tell it what you've been ashamed of, tell it what you've been afraid of, tell it what you've needed from it that it hasn't given you. And then, if you can, when you're ready, tell it what it's been through. Tell it what it survived, tell it what it did right, even in the moments you've held it against it. Then write the letter back from your body to you. What would your body say if it could speak? What has it been trying to communicate that you've been too busy being angry to hear? This is shadow work and somatic work and parts work and narrative work all in one. It's one of the most powerful practices I know for beginning to shift the relationship. Write that letter to your body.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

Let that body write a letter back to you.

Letter To Your Body And Closing

SPEAKER_00 33:21

That's it, my dears.

SPEAKER_01 33:23

Take what you need and leave the rest. There is no assignment here. There is no homework. There is no order in which you have to do these things. The point isn't to work through every technique. The point is to find one or two things that feel or sounded like they could open a door. And I want you to start there. Just there, just one door. Because body healing is slow. It's not linear. You'll have days where you feel something genuinely shift and days where you're back at the beginning. Both are the process. Neither is the truth of where you are. Healing is hard as shit. It can be uncomfortable, uncomfortable, uncomfortable, but it's worth it because what happens on the other side is a freedom that I don't have the words to express. Your body carried you through something it shouldn't have had to carry. It's still here. You're still here. And you're doing the work of tending the relationship between you. That matters. That is the work. Next week's main episode will be Fury at the people who moved on while you're still healing. It'll be a good conversation. I thank you so much for being here with me today. I thank you so much for allowing me to just help you heal, maybe even the millimeterest little bit when it comes to healing from sexual trauma, because I know how heavy it is to be unhealed after sexual trauma and how much space that can take up. So I'm glad you're here with me. I thank you so much. If there's anyone that you think can benefit from hearing this, please share it. Please talk about it. I do not market. I am not on social media. This is all by word of mouth. And I really just want to help any woman that has experienced sexual trauma feel just a little bit, feel a little bit better. So please share. Please start the conversation because we need, as a society, as women, to talk about this shit, to make it real, to not hide behind it, to not let the perpetrators and the violators get away with it.

SPEAKER_00 35:41

We need to keep this conversation alive and prevalent until behaviors change. So share it. Please.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

So take that back. Share it if you want. Share it if you don't. Send me an emoji. Give me your favorite color heart if you resonated with this episode and really benefited from it. I'd appreciate the feedback. Until next time, please take the gentlest care of your awakened heart. And I will see you soon, my dears. Bye bye.