Episode 12: What Is Somatic Therapy? Why Your Nervous System Is Stuck in Survival (And How to Shift It)

There comes a point in healing where insight stops being enough.

You understand your trauma.
You know your patterns.
But your body is still reacting - anxious, overwhelmed, shut down, or stuck in the same cycles.

In this foundational episode of The Unfuckwithable Woman, Briony Montgomery breaks down what somatic therapy is and why it’s one of the most powerful approaches for trauma healing, nervous system regulation, and emotional resilience in today’s world.

You’ll learn:

– What the nervous system actually is (in simple, accessible language)
– Why your body responds from past experiences, not just the present
– The four core survival states: fight, flight, fawn, and freeze
– How the fawn response keeps you overgiving, people-pleasing, and disconnected from yourself
– Why talk therapy alone often isn’t enough
– How somatic therapy works to create safety in the body
– And how to begin shifting from survival into grounded, embodied flow

This episode explores how your body holds your lived experiences and how healing happens when you work with it, not against it.

Because your body isn’t the problem.
It’s the pathway.

🔗 Explore somatic practices, The Daily Root, and work with Briony:
www.thesomatherapycollective.com

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Subscribe to The Unfuckwithable Woman on YouTube for grounded conversations on somatic therapy, nervous system healing, matrilineal repair, trauma healing and embodied living.

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For daily nervous system support, grounding reflections and small consistent practices that bring you back to your body, subscribe to The Daily Root 🌳🤎

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Explore deeper support through The SomaTherapy Collective

Offerings include:

• The Daily Root - daily nervous system support
• 1:1 Somatic Therapy Sessions
• Clarity Sessions
• Mother Wound & Matrilineal Healing
• The MotherWay

This work is about more than healing symptoms.
It is about reclaiming your body, your voice, your humanity and your connection to life itself.

Empowerment. Healing. Liberation.

The revolution starts within.

Music by Finn Holleman
Photography by bethcronin_stillpoetry

Connect with Briony and The SomaTherapy Collective across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.

📩 briony@thesomatherapycollective.com

#somatictherapy #moth...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:57

So there comes a point in healing where insight stops being enough. You know your patterns, you know where they come from, and yet your body still reacts. You still feel anxious, overwhelmed, shut down, or stuck in the same cycles. And the reason is simple. Your nervous system is operating from survival. So welcome to the Unfuckwithable Woman. This is a space for truth, for reclamation, for the kind of healing that doesn't just live in your mind but in your body, your relationships, and your life. I'm Briani, founder of the Soma Therapy Collective, and today we're starting at the foundation. So in my own journey and how I came to somatic therapy, was that after 2002, after my mother passed away, I found myself at the doorstep to spirituality and to understanding the metaphysical. I had this kind of experiences leading up to that, where I understood that there was disease, dis-ease in my maternal mother line, and that that was an inherited pattern that had been coming through the line from various different places and for various different situations and reasons. And I started to experience and understand that what was happening physically in the body was happening first in the metaphysical space and manifesting through the body and started to rebuild my own system and self after my mother's death of living in this hyper-vigilant, overwhelmed fight, flight, fawn, freeze state, and not ever feeling this window of flow, this window of tolerance that we talk about in the somatic therapy field. I didn't have access to safety in my body, is what I realized because I had lived in such a hyper-vigilant, alert state my whole life that now that I had had really escaped that that reality in my day-to-day, I needed to understand my body's patterning and my nervous system patterning in and around what felt unsafe and what felt safe. And that was really when somatic therapy for me really became almost like a magic, magic pill or magic toolkit that started to release charge in my body and resolve a lot of traumatic experiences and episodes that I'd had previously to that time. And I started to find an equilibrium, I started to find regulation and flow in my system, which allowed me to build capacity and allowed me to feel stable and secure for the first time in my life, and also started to rebuild and repattern not just my nervous system but neurological pathways in which I could measure what safety, what fight felt like, what fawn, what flight, and what freeze felt like in my body. So I could start to instead of react when I was triggered, which is what I was used to, reacting and falling into this kind of pattern of safety, uh, what I thought was safety, or to get myself into safety and survival. I now, you know, when those incidences and events and and dynamics in relationship would trigger my nervous system, I would be able to sit and cultivate a presence and them in the middle space before I actually, instead of reacting, I started to respond because I learned in that space on how to repattern my nervous system. There is a reason you can understand your trauma and still feel triggered, anxious, disconnected, or stuck in the same patterns. Because understanding alone does not change the body, and your body is where your life is happening. Right now, we are living in a world that is fast, demanding, uncertain, and often disconnected from real safety. Your nervous system is constantly responding to pressure, expectation, overstimulation, lack of rest. And so when you feel overwhelmed, it makes sense. Your body is not broken, it's responding intelligently to this system of capitalism and hierarchical systems of oppression and power, and this kind of go, go, go, push, push, push power dynamic that we are all cultured in. In somatic work, you notice that you don't react as quickly, that you feel more grounded, that you trust yourself more, that you stop abandoning yourself in relationships, and slowly your life begins to feel different. Not perfect, but regulated. And even regulation to me is such a very um like regulation can look so different to every to so many different people, and regulation still even sits in a space of an expectation of how your nervous system must must be presented to be in a healthy state. And I like to use instead of regulation, I like to use flow because often we are flowing in and out of states, and it's quite healthy when we have a healthy nervous system to go into places like fight, flight, fawn, and freeze, but only spend a little time in those places and then come back into this flow state. So our nervous systems are designed to go in and out of these states on the day-to-day, you know, in regular places and spaces. And maybe it's not day-to-day, but it could be, you know, there are definite places and events and situations where you touch on those different nervous system responses. And when you're present with those nervous system responses, you can bring yourself back into a flow state, back into that state of healthy pulsation with your nervous system where you feel safe and secure. Let's first talk about what your nervous system is. It is your body's internal safety system. Its job is to constantly ask, am I safe or am I under threat? And it answers that question instantly based on your past experiences, not just your present reality. There are a few key states your system moves through. Regulation safety. This is when your system feels safe enough. You might feel grounded, open, connected, able to think clearly, able to be present with others. Your breath is steady, your body feels settled. This is where connection, creativity, and healing happen. The next one is the fight, flight activation state. This is your body preparing to deal with stress or perceived danger. Most people are familiar with anxiety, but what's often not understood is how many forms this can take, especially the flight state. Flight doesn't always look like running away physically. More often it feels like a constant internal urgency, racing thoughts that won't slow down, overthinking, everything feeling like you need to figure it out right now, restlessness in your body, difficulty being still, always needing to be busy or productive, and a sense that if you stop, something bad will happen. There can also be perfectionism, overworking, over planning, controlling outcomes, and it can feel like I just need to get on top of everything. I can't relax yet. I'll feel okay once this is sorted. But the body never quite settles because the system is stuck in anticipation of threat. The next state is the fawn relational survival state. The fawn response is often less spoken about, but incredibly common. This is when your body learns I stay safe by keeping others happy. It can feel like automatically saying yes when you want to say no, prioritizing other people's needs over your own, feeling responsible for others' emotions, scanning for what others need from you, softening, shrinking, or adjusting yourself to maintain connection, difficulty expressing boundaries, fear of conflict or disapproval. Internally, it can feel like if they're okay, I'm okay. I just need to keep the peace. I don't want to upset anyone. This response is deeply intelligent. It develops in environments where connection felt uncertain or conditional, and it often becomes invisible because it's rewarded. But over time it leads to exhaustion, loss of self, and resentment. The next state is the freeze shutdown state. Freeze happens when the system becomes overwhelmed. When fight, flight, or fawn aren't enough, the body shuts things down. This can feel like numbness, disconnection, heaviness, lack of motivation, brain fog, feeling stuck or unable to move forward. And often these states can be happening simultaneously as well. You could have a couple of those states together. You could be doing, you know, going into the fight response and also have fawning. You can be in freeze and fawn as well. You can be in fight and flight simultaneously and moving between the two. And sometimes fight can look like flight or vice versa. And in my own experience with my own nervous system, when I started to unpack it with somatic therapy, is that my preference was to go into fight in a threatening situation or a situation where I am trying to get myself to safety. And in that preference to do or that automatic reaction to go into fight when I felt under threat, I would often in that place look at those that were in shutdown and freeze as a way of getting themselves in a state or space of safety as a really undesirable place to be. It was almost like those people that were in shutdown were irritating. I felt that the shutdown state, it would just aggravate my fight state and I would feel more threatened. And as I unpacked this more and more for myself, I started to realize that actually my fight, my fight state had some freeze in it as well. And when I would go into freeze, I had this sense in my body that if I went into freeze, that it was more threatening for me because of the nature of the trauma that I'd been through and what I had my nervous system had created for safety. Is if I had stayed still and I had a shut down, it would have been more dangerous for me than it would have been to fight my way out of the situation. And so my nervous system had developed these really intelligent ways of actually keeping my body and myself safe in really threatening, ongoing situations that I had been raised in, as well as I found myself in the adult in my adult years that I was actually in these kind of really threatening situations and threatening dynamics where I had to remain on this hyper-vigilant, alert stage. And in that, when I discovered that I had freeze in my system because when I wanted to fight, there was this freeze element as well that was happening simultaneously. When I started to realize and tease those things apart and bring a lot of understanding as to what my nervous system was doing when it was under threat, then I was able to start to see all of these different states as such an integral, intelligent way that my own system was responding when it was under threat. And I started to be able to not just pattern my system in how it was responding, but re-pattern it with a lot of compassion and understanding that each one of these states has a purpose, and each one of these states, when moved in with and engaged with in a somatic therapy session or somatic therapy space where you're being held and guided by a somatic therapist, is that when you engage with these states, you can actually have some really positive impact on your nervous system and on these traumatic events that you've actually experienced because you can release discharge and all of these states, there's not one state that's good or bad, they just are, and each one of them has a really great way of alchemalizing that state in your body to bring about uh some equilibrium and to bring about some safety and and support in your nervous system. Your nervous system is not always reacting to what is happening now, it is responding to what it expects based on the past or is triggered in the current space from what has happened in the past. So if your system learnt that love required overgiving, conflict wasn't safe, rest led to disapproval, it will continue those patterns automatically. This is why you can know something logically and still feel something completely different in your body. Because your body is trying to protect you based on the information that is stored in the body. So how somatic therapy works is we work directly with these states, not by forcing change, but by creating safety in the body. We begin to notice sensations, track activation, slow things down, and gently support the system to move from flight into settling, fawn into boundaries and self-connection, freeze into safe re-engagement. And this might look like feeling your feet on the ground, noticing your breath, allowing small moments of pause, staying with sensation without overwhelm, and noticing what is here. And over time the body learns, I am safe now. And it starts to develop this capacity and understanding of what safety feels like. Often when I'm in the clinic space, and even when I came into somatic therapy as well and started to learn this for myself, for my own personal life. So when you're working with your nervous system in somatic therapy, you don't need to overhaul your life. You begin in small, consistent shifts. And this is why I created my um, you know, the daily nervous system support tool called the daily root, because it's simple somatic practices that you can weave into your everyday life and it leads, kind of um tills the ground underneath you and in your system, readying you um for uh for deeper work. Often we don't understand what safety feels like in the body, and we often don't even have access to what the body's sensations are or what even what we're noticing in the body. Often, when we come into connection with the body, it can feel really threatening and overwhelming. It could be often in in clinic space, it's often the first time a client has ever had any kind of connection or inquiry into what their body is feeling like and what they are noticing. And it can feel quite stressful, overwhelming. The cognitive self comes in and tries to fill in the blanks and the spaces to kind of regain some control or some automatic response. And when we slow things down and we start to look at how we know safety is here, what are we noticing, and how we how do we know that is here? When we start to slow that down and we start to pattern that in that person's nervous system, then we start to build that sense of safety and what that sense of safety feels like to that person, because every person will have a different sense of what feels safe to them. So somatic therapy right now, at this particular time in history, in this in the context of what's happening in the world, is that we are living in a time where our nervous system is constantly activated. There's constant input, constant pressure, constant demand. So, of course, your body feels overwhelmed, stressed, it feels like in this constant state of shutdown, of numb, I can't take anymore, like it's all too much. I I'm worried about things, I'm stressed. You know, it's a very normal uh part of what we're all feeling to some degree in the world right now. And somatic therapy isn't just about healing the past, it's about building capacity to live in the present without your system constantly going into survival. When your nervous system begins to regulate or begins to flow, you feel calmer, you respond instead of react. Set boundaries without guilt and stop abandoning yourself. You feel more present in your life and connected to those around you and community and what is happening in the world. And you can develop these secure attachment places within yourself and also around you. And slowly you come back to yourself, you come back to your resources, your creativity, your pleasure, your purpose, and your power bit by bit as you learn and discover what feels good in your body and what feels safe. And the work in somatic therapy is slow, it's not um focused on getting to the end destination quickly, it is slow and really guided by your own body and your nervous system. Some people feel like they need to move really quickly, and the wonderful thing about somatic therapy and working with the nervous system, it is all body-led and at your pace, and it is really a space in which you are in charge of how you build your capacity and how you build resource in your body, and it really is a one-step at a time formula, really, if you could kind of coin it that way, of moving where for the first time potentially in your life, you are in control of how your body and where your body is going. And we use the mind in this way of that, we start to use the mind and the body together. So we don't get rid of the mind, we don't get rid of any sensations or any feelings, nothing is off the table here, nothing is out of the scope of what we work with. We actually bring more in, we actually bring more sensation, more feeling, more noticing. Because we're building capacity through presence, we're slowing everything down, and then our receptors and our body and you know, all of us is opened up to really noticing the nuances around us. And when we build that presence in, it changes how we meet our life, it changes how we meet others, it changes how we meet connection, it changes how we meet our work and how we meet those stresses and how we meet that overwhelm in our day-to-day and all the to-do lists. For me, when I was going through um a separation um uh from uh 2022, and I was going through a family court uh dynamic, which was extremely difficult, extremely stressful and overwhelming, also trying to heal from um a toxic relationship. Relationship and trying to stabilize my children's nervous systems and their pain in this dynamic, as well as trying to get us into stable accommodation, get support stable, get income stable, all of these different stresses and all of these different things on the to-do list was extremely overwhelming, and my system was under a huge amount of stress and strain. And what I did with the somatic therapy is that as I cultivated and met my nervous system, what was happening in my nervous system with all the waves that kept hitting me, the to-do list didn't get smaller, it didn't change shape or direction. The to-do list and the reality of my situation stayed the same. What changed was my ability to meet it? What change was my ability to show up in a state that was in flow and regulated so I could do one foot in front of the other and I could take my um I could take my system into a place of regulation, even in an exterior format that looked really stressful and overwhelming. I was able to slow it down and manage the stress and overwhelm in my system so that I could actually make really clear strategic steps in order to stabilize the situation for myself and my children and ultimately my nervous system. And what I found in this place and space, because I actionated the somatic therapy work fairly early in the piece of the separation, is that I was hearing stories and seeing and being involved in groups with other women who were having very similar dynamics, and they were going through them or out the other side six years, ten years later, and they were still dealing with a lot of dysregulation in their system, they were still dealing with a lot of disconnection in their environment, their stresses and overwhelm did not feel better. They were still heightened at certain points, and certain um points were extremely overwhelming for them, and their system was constantly being flooded by what was what was happening in their external environment and the internal pain that these situations touch on as well, and that are often linked or connected to earlier experiences in childhood and relational dynamics that I noticed that I was able to move through the overwhelm and stress and the emotions flooding my system in a much more present, powerful, purposeful, and directive way with a lot of clarity and a lot of ground that I built my capacity and my safety in my system quite quickly so that I could, with each wave that came, I could slow it down and I could be present enough in my body to instead of react to respond. And it was absolutely revolutionary to actually move in this way, in this place and space that was extremely um high conflict and extremely disempowering in so many ways, or built to disempower uh women in so many ways. And I was able to harness, I was able to ride it, I was able, it was able to fuel, created like this um transformation within me that I was able to harness, alchemalize, and really bring into the day-to-day as I was navigating that period of time, and that has remained quite consistent and quite a valuable resource even to this very day. So if this episode resonated with you, it's because your body recognizes this, and this is exactly the work we do inside the Soma Therapy Collective. You can begin with the Daily Root, which is simple semantic practices that are delivered to your inbox every day. You can uh subscribe on my website to this resource uh at www.thematherapy collective.com. You can explore the rest of this podcast series, especially the episodes on Mother Wound, Death Mother, uh the Inner Critic, as well as nervous system work uh at uh the Unfuckwithable Woman Podcast.com and my previous series, which was called the Resourced Woman Podcast. If you feel that this is valuable to anybody in your community, please share, please subscribe, and please rate the podcast so more people can see the work that I'm putting out into the world. Or if you would like to work with me directly through one-on-one sessions, you can also find all of that information at the somatherapy collective.com. I'm also on all the social platforms TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube under Brine Montgomery and the Soma Therapy Collective. And I want to leave you with this. Your body is not the problem, it is the pathway, it is the opening to finding exactly what you're needing for exactly the challenge that you're facing right now. Thank you so much for listening.