Body-First Healing Podcast

Q&A: How to Talk About Your Trauma Without Over-Explaining, Quiet a Racing Mind at Night & Heal Without Reliving the Past

• Britt Piper • Episode 46

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 30:26

You finally crawl into bed exhausted, and that is the exact moment your mind decides to replay every conversation and solve every problem you have ever had. In this Q&A episode, Britt answers four thoughtful listener questions through a body-first lens: when and how to tell a partner you have CPTSD, what is really happening in your nervous system when you are tired but wired at night, whether you can heal trauma with somatic experiencing without revisiting specific memories, and how to help a highly logical partner understand your healing journey. If you have ever felt like your reactions do not make sense, this episode is a steady reminder that they do, and that healing can happen through the body in the present moment rather than by reliving the past.


Related episode: Somatic Practice for Overthinking, Rumination, & Mental Loops


Connect with Britt

Welcome to the Q&A!

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the Body First Healing Podcast. I'm Britt Piper, Survivor Turn Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Aut. If you feel stuck in old patterns, overwhelmed by your emotions, or disconnected from yourself, you're in the right place. Each week, I'll share practical somatic tools, personal stories, and conversations to support you in building a more regulated and embodied life. Because you can't talk your way through healing. You have to feel your way through. Together, we'll explore what it means to come back to yourself and create a life that feels safe enough to fully live in. I am so glad that you're here. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Body First Healing Podcast. I am your host, Britt Piper, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, author, and somatic educator. You guys, I'm excited because we are doing a QA episode today. This is one of my favorite format of episodes to do because I get to answer your questions. It kind of feels like I'm back in the Body First Healing program. Every Tuesday we do a QA call as a group. And so it's just one of my favorite ways to just really connect and yeah, just connect with you guys.

Listener Review

SPEAKER_00

So before we get into it, I want to share just a lovely review. Every time you guys send a review in, whether it's on Spotify, whether it's on Apple, I want you to know that I read them all. And they mean so, so much to me. And they also just give some insight into what's landing with you, what's supporting you, and maybe what you want to see more of here on the podcast. So this is from For the Love of Podcasting. And it says, This is my first time reviewing a podcast. Oh my gosh, I feel so honored. Thank you. Even though I'm an avid listener, Britt Piper has a way of clearly and lovingly exposing the truth of what I've been feeling for my 30 years on this planet. Wow. Her voice, her wisdom, and her softness create a pathway of love and healing. Gosh, this means so much to me. And I will say, you know, so much of the mission behind this podcast is to help people feel less alone. It's to help people to recognize that everything that they're experiencing makes so much sense, right? When we learn the science and learn the context into how our bodies, brains, and nervous systems are always working to help us heal and to help us survive. So yeah, this message lands so well with me. Thank you so much for this review. All right, guys, let's get into it. You know, I say this every time that we do these episodes, but the questions that come out of this audience are never surface level. And I appreciate that about you all so much. They're thoughtful questions. They're nuanced, they're deeply human. And so, yeah, I'm just really excited to share these with you guys. So, just a bit of a preview. Today we're going to explore what's happening in the nervous system when you are completely exhausted, but your mind won't stop racing at night. We're going to talk about whether trauma can be healed through somatic experiencing without revisiting specific memories. That's a question I actually get a lot. We're going to discuss how and when to tell a romantic partner that you have complex PTSD or how to help a very highly logical or cognitive partner understand your somatic healing journey. And then to wrap it up, I'm going to talk a little bit about what I did before and during pregnancy to support just intergenerational patterns. So it's going to be a good episode. You guys stick around for the whole thing. My hope is that as you listen, you hear pieces of your own story really reflected back to you. All right. So let's get into question one. And the

Q1: When to Tell a Partner You Have CPTSD

SPEAKER_00

question is: at what point would you suggest telling a romantic partner that you have CPTSD? And how would you communicate that? So, first of all, I really love this question because I think there's kind of a lot of confusion, but also vulnerability in relationships. Many people are trying to find the perfect moment to disclose something important about themselves. And underneath that is often this deeper fear of if they really knew me, would they still choose me? And so I first just want to start by saying that I don't think that there is like a universal timeline for any couple, right? For any relationship. I also don't think it's a first date conversation. And I don't think it's something that you need to hide until you're like years into a relationship either. Okay. For me, it becomes relevant when the relationship has demonstrated enough safety, enough consistency, and potential, or we could say alignment, okay, that your inner world is beginning to matter to each other. So in other words, when you're no longer just getting to know someone's like favorite foods or hobbies, you know, but you're really beginning to understand how they move through life, you know, relationship, stress, conflict, connection, that is where we have an entry point. Now, one of the things that I often see people do is they disclose their experiences from a place of explanation or almost apology. Okay, so it's almost like they feel responsible for preparing the other person. They feel like they need to, you know, warn them. So the conversation might become something like, just so you know, I have CPTSD. And while there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I think there's often a more empowering way to approach it. So rather than leading with a diagnosis, and we could say this for any diagnosis, really, you know, not just CPTSD, I usually encourage people to lead with self-awareness. So that might sound something like, you know, there are some experiences in my past that really shaped my nervous system in certain ways. And because of that, there are times when I can become more activated around, you know, and then what is that for you? Maybe conflict or distance or unpredictability, or maybe it's even closeness or feeling misunderstood. And I've done a lot of healing around it, and it's something I'm continuing to work with. Right. So do we hear the difference between the two? You know, one approach kind of says, like, here's what's wrong with me, whereas the other says, here's something important to understand about how I work, right? How my brain, body, and nervous system operate. Because the goal, I mean, ultimately, isn't to hand someone a diagnosis and then hope that they know what to do with it, right? The goal is to invite them into understanding your experience and your world. I would say also that the other piece I think is important is remembering that disclosure is not the same thing as handing someone responsibility for your healing. Okay, a healthy partner can support your journey. They can learn about what activates you, they can learn about your triggers, they can become more aware of your nervous system, but they cannot regulate for you. They can't heal for you or, you know, carry the weight of your entire history. Like that's still our work to do. And honestly, I think one of the most beautiful things about healthy relationships is that they give us opportunities to have different experiences than we had in the past. They can become places where our nervous system can learn something new. But that learning truly happens through honesty, right? And not perfection honesty. It happens through moments where you can say, I'm noticing I'm activated right now. Or this isn't about you, but something old just got touched inside of me. And so the right partner doesn't need you to be trauma-free. Okay. The right partner needs us to be self-aware because self-awareness is going to create intimacy. It's going to create understanding and possibility for repair. And so if someone responds to your vulnerability and to your sharing with judgment or dismissal or shame, then that's important information too. And it's not because it means that either of you are in the wrong necessarily, but it more so can give you information about their capacity, right? Relationships reveal capacity, they reveal emotional maturity and they can also reveal like who's willing to meet you in the places that matter most to you. So again, don't think of this as like a conversation around disclosure. Think of it more as like an invitation into deeper understanding. And just remember that the people who are meant to know you deeply will eventually need to understand the terrain of your inner world. And the healthiest relationships are built one honest conversation at a time. Okay. And that can happen over time. All right, guys, let's move into our second question. I love that one. It was a great way to start off the episode. So the second question is

Q2: Nervous System Tips for Sleep & Racing Mind

SPEAKER_00

any nervous system-based tips for improving sleep when you're exhausted, but your mind is still racing. Okay, good one. Another good one. I love this question because I feel like almost everyone has experienced some version of it. Like whether you're in seasons of parenthood or crazy work stuff or you're in school, right? Like stress, life in general. You're tired. Your body is tired. You've been looking forward to bed all day long. And then your head hits the pillow, and suddenly it's like your brain decides well, this is the perfect time to replay every single conversation I've had and to solve every single one of my life problems and to imagine 12 different catastrophic futures before midnight. Oh my gosh, it's the worst. I first just want to say that when this happens, most people kind of assume that the problem is their thoughts. Okay. From a nervous system perspective, the thoughts are often the symptom. And if you guys didn't catch it already, I did a previous episode on overthinking. Okay, so go back and listen to that episode. The thoughts are just a symptom. Okay. So the deeper question is what state is your body in when you go to bed? When you're getting into bed, what state is your nervous system? One of the things that I teach frequently in the Body First Healing program, because insomnia is a very common symptom that we can see when we have nervous system dysregulation, is that many of us spend our days overriding our internal experience. Right? We kind of, and I'll just invite you now, like, think about your day. Did you move from task to task? Did you go from responsibility to responsibility, conversation to conversation? Like we stay productive, we stay busy, we stay engaged and focused, and we don't necessarily stop long enough to notice what's happening inside of us. And so then when nighttime arrives and the emails stop and the children are asleep and the distractions kind of like fall away, for the first time in all of the day, the nervous system is kind of left alone with itself. And for many people, this is when the activation finally becomes noticeable. And I see this a lot in our somatic sessions, you know, when we do the somatic experiencing sessions in the Body First Healing program, we just had one this morning. And the client, the participant in that session was talking and talking and talking very quickly. And there was so much mobilizing activation there. And when we slowed it down, and I said, can we place that up on the shelf for a moment and come back to it and just instead slow down and notice what's happening in the body? And as we slowed down, tears started to emerge, heat started to emerge, sweat started to emerge, trembling and shaking, and the nervous system was able to finally process what was being overridden in the moment. Okay, so we can kind of see this happen at night too. What we experience as racing thoughts is often just that sympathetic energy, right? The adrenaline and cortisol of fight or flight that hasn't yet completed its cycle throughout the day. And so the body is still kind of mobilized, even though the day is over. And you can kind of think of it like the nervous system hasn't yet received the message that it's safe to transition into resting. And so this is why like trying to force yourself to stop thinking rarely works. And if anything, it actually makes the overthinking worse. Again, the thoughts are not the problem. They're often the mind's attempt to explain the activation that's happening in your body. So what's the goal then? The goal actually becomes helping the body to potentially discharge, okay, whether through light movement, stretching, shaking, vocalizing, okay. Instead of winding down, we want to wind up a little bit. Could there be a five-minute walk that you could do even through, you know, your home, around the block for a moment? What can you do to get out some of that adrenaline and cortisol? Can you wind up, allow the body to discharge? And then we want to allow the settling to happen. Okay, then we wind down. So one of my favorite practices for winding down is orienting. Okay, so before trying to sleep, can you just allow your eyes and your senses to orient to the space that you're in? Can you notice the corners of the room? Notice the texture on the walls, notice any shapes, colors, patterns. Okay, notice places that feel neutral or even pleasant to explore with your senses. Right? The feeling of the sheets on your skin, the weight of the blanket. And it sounds incredibly simple, but orienting, we call this exploratory orienting. And we do this through a sensory motor system, which is constantly communicating with the nervous system. Exploratory orienting is one of the primary ways that the system gathers information about safety. So in these moments, you're helping the body recognize that it's here now, in this room, in this bed, and that it's safe enough to settle. I also encourage people to shift their attention away from, you know, trying to sleep and toward creating conditions for rest. Okay. Those two things are not the same. Sleep is a biological process that happens when the nervous system feels safe enough to surrender its consciousness. And we can't force that surrender. We can only create the conditions that support it. So sometimes, again, that's going to look like feeling the weight of your body against the mattress. Sometimes that looks like, you know, playing soft music, or we have a white noise machine that we still play in our bedroom at night to help us sleep. You know, we have blackout curtains, which help our body to kind of rest more. You know, sometimes it can look like touch or co-regulation, like placing a hand on your chest or another on your abdomen and just noticing that your body is being held. Now, the other thing that I want to normalize is that racing thoughts often show up during seasons of change and grief and stress. And so, you know, your nervous system may be attempting to process experiences that didn't have enough space during the day. So rather than immediately fighting those experiences, can you see if you're able to approach them with curiosity?

unknown

Right.

SPEAKER_00

So, like, what is my body trying to metabolize? What feels unfinished? What have I not given myself permission to feel? Sometimes the most powerful sleep intervention isn't going to be another supplement or another sleep hack. Sometimes it's really just creating like enough space during your waking hours for your nervous system to process what it's been carrying so it doesn't have to do all of that work at night in the dark when you're trying to settle down. All right, guys, let's move into our next question.

Q3: Healing Trauma Without Revisiting Memories

SPEAKER_00

Can you heal trauma with somatic experiencing without going into specific memories and instead work with day-to-day fight-flight freeze responses? Okay, so the short answer is yes, absolutely. And in fact, one of the things that initially drew me to SC or somatic experiencing was that it offered a completely different way of understanding trauma. Like most of us grew up believing that healing requires remembering everything, right? Understanding everything and just talking about everything. And while there, you know, can certainly be value in making sense of our experiences, like so much value in that. Somatic experiencing starts from a really different premise. It asks the question what if trauma is not primarily stored as a story? What if it's stored as physiology? And this is where it's helpful to understand the difference between explicit memory and implicit memory. So explicit memories are the memories that you can consciously recall. They're the verbal memories that you can explain. Okay, they have a storyline, you know what happened, where it happened, and often when it happened. Implicit memories, on the other hand, are different. They are stored as body memory. Okay, so nonverbal memory, like sensation, emotion, reflex, posture, impulse, and kind of our nervous system states. So you may not remember the event itself, but your body will always remember the experience. And this is why someone can feel intense anxiety when a partner like pulls away emotionally without consciously connecting it to earlier experiences of abandonment. It can also be why, you know, someone can become highly activated around conflict, even if they can't immediately identify why. So the nervous system doesn't need a detailed narrative to recreate a survival response. It simply recognizes a familiar pattern. We call these procedural patterns, and it prepares the body accordingly. Now, one of the things that I often tell clients is that your body is not responding to what happened 20 years ago. Okay. Your body is responding to what it believes is happening right now. And that's why we can do so much work through present-day experiences. You know, we can do that by working with the racing heart or the tightening in your chest or the impulse to leave or collapse or people please or the hypervigilance that shows up. We can work directly with the physiology that's showing up in this moment without needing to excavate every memory that contributed to it. So in somatic experiencing, we are often far more interested in the nervous system's response than the content of the story. So if someone tells me about a difficult experience, for instance, I'm not only listening to the words that they're saying, I am more so paying attention to what happens in their body while they're saying it. Somatic experiencing was developed by Dr. Peter Levine, who is a psychotherapist, trauma researcher. But but he also brought in the concepts of ethology into somatic experiencing. And ethology is the study of animals in the wild. Right. So somatic experiencing practitioners were kind of like, you know, we study human animals through the body. So I can notice things like does their breathing change? Do their shoulders rise? Did the fascia expand with that breath? Does the face lose color? Do they suddenly look away? Right. The physiology in the body is always telling us where the activation is living. And this is also, I guess we could say, why many people experience profound healing without ever recovering every detail of their past. Somatic experiencing practitioners, just as an example, you know, because we work primarily with implicit or body memory, we can work with survivors of trauma and utero or birth trauma, because implicit memory or body memory starts to form itself Seven weeks in the womb, whereas explicit or verbal memory starts to form around the age of two to three years old. Right. So although you can't remember those experiences in the womb, your body does. And those responses and patterns can show up today. And we can work with that, right? That's the story. That's the memory that we work with. So all that to say, healing does not require perfect recall. It requires helping the nervous system complete responses that never got to complete in the first place. So that could be fight responses that got suppressed. It could be flight responses that got interrupted or freeze responses that became really chronic over time. The body has an incredible capacity to reorganize when given the right conditions. And I think this can be deeply relieving for people because there are many individuals who worry that they can't heal unless they remember everything, right? Like sometimes there are memory gaps or the memories are fragmented, or sometimes we don't remember or we don't want to spend years remembering and revisiting painful events. And so, you know, the good news is that the nervous system gives us another doorway because the body is constantly showing us where the work is. And that shows up in the way that we react to stress, the way that we respond to conflict or, you know, navigate intimacy or experience safety, boundaries, rest, right? All of these things. These day-to-day experiences become the entry point. And what I have witnessed in this work and experience personally is this is where some of the most powerful healing happens. Okay, not in reliving the past, but in helping the body have a different experience here in the present. All right, guys, let's get into our last question. So, question four

Q4: Helping a Logical Partner Understand Somatic Healing

SPEAKER_00

How do you get an overly logical partner to understand your somatic or regulation journey or past trauma? Okay, guys, so I will say this is such a common dynamic. And so I just want to start by normalizing it. Okay, often in relationships, one partner naturally experiences the world through emotion and sensation and internal awareness, while the other tends to experience the world through logic and problem solving and analysis. And I will say that, you know, neither approach is inherently better. They're simply different ways of organizing experience. And then when you bring in somatic healing and nervous system regulation and that whole framework into the dynamic, it can really exasperate some of those differences. So the challenge happens when we assume that understanding requires sameness. Okay. Many people spend years trying to convince their partner to feel what they feel. You know, they want their spouse to understand trauma, the way that they understand trauma. They want them to really appreciate nervous system work, that the way that they appreciate nervous system work. And ultimately it's this desire to become as emotionally attuned to the process as they are. Okay. The goal is not always going to necessarily be agreement. The goal is understanding. And so I've worked with many people who are in relationships where one partner has done years of therapy, somatic work, personal development, while the other partner kind of remains like really highly practical, logical, and sometimes a little skeptical of the whole thing. Right. And so what often helps is shifting away from explaining trauma as a concept and instead describing observable experiences. So, for example, instead of saying my nervous system is dysregulated because of childhood attachment wounds, you might say, when conflict happens, my body reacts as if the stakes are much higher than they actually are. And I feel that like when my heart races and I have trouble thinking clearly and I get overwhelmed. You know, I'm working on helping my body learn. It doesn't have to react that way anymore. And so a logical person doesn't necessarily need to understand every detail of trauma theory. They simply need a framework that helps them understand what's happening now, what your experience is, and how they can respond effectively. I also think it can be important to remember that people often become more receptive, okay, when they see results. So sometimes the most convincing evidence isn't going to be the podcast that you send them. Send them my podcast, I'm just kidding, a book or, you know, any like a scientific explanation or Instagram post, okay? It's watching you, like it's watching their partner become calmer and more present and more regulated and connected and more capable of navigating just really difficult moments. That change creates so much credibility. I would also say, you know, the other thing I can kind of like gently offer here is that your spouse may never be interested, or we could say as interested in nervous system work as you are. And that's okay. Okay, the goal isn't like to recruit them into another version of you, although that would be great. Like I wish everyone would get on the nervous system train. The goal is to create enough mutual understanding that both of you can navigate the relationship with greater compassion. And so one of the most helpful questions that you can ask yourself is, you know, do I need them to understand everything? Or do I just need them to understand enough? Because those are two very different things, right? Understanding enough might look like them knowing that certain situations are activating for you. It might look like them recognizing when you're overwhelmed, or them giving you space when you need it or staying connected during moments that previously felt really, really difficult. Okay. That's very different than expecting them to become more like a trauma expert. And honestly, some of the healthiest relationships that I personally have seen aren't built on two people having like identical perspectives. They're built on two people being curious about the experiences that they don't share personally. And so at the end of the day, being understood is wonderful, but being accepted is even more powerful. Okay. Sometimes the greatest gift that a partner can offer isn't that complete understanding, but rather more of a willingness to stay present while they're learning. All right, you guys, this is going to wrap up our episode today on the Body First Healing podcast. I love, love, love your questions. Like I said, this is just such a mirror of our Tuesday calls in the Body First Healing program. If this is something that you want to do on a weekly basis in an incredible community with me and other like-minded people who are speaking the language of nervous system somatics and trauma, then come on over to the Body First Healing program. A great place to start. Remember, you guys can always grab my book. If this episode landed with you, please, please share, tag me, comment, let me know what resonated. And I will see you guys next week here on the Body First Healing Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Body First Healing podcast. If this episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you subscribed, left a review, or shared it with someone that you love. I'll see you back here next week. And until then, be gentle with yourself. You're doing the best you can with what you have, and that is more than enough. Just a quick note this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Always consult a qualified provider for personal support.