The Somatic Experience: How the Body Stores Trauma and the Path to Physiological Healing (Episode #95)

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Welcome to the human intimacy podcast. Dr. Kevin Skinner with Marianne Michaelis, licensed clinical social worker. Marianne, quick question. How are you feeling today? And I'm not just thinking hangover from turkey and food, just physiologically, how are you doing?

Mm. Dr. Skinner, I have been fighting a cold. It's been a couple of weeks and I'm still coughing and I'm noticing what my body's doing. I think when we're talking about how we're doing, we can talk on what's going on with your body and then we can talk about what's going on with your mood, your emotions.

Yeah, perfect setup for what we're talking about today because we're talking about our body and our physiological response to life events and experiences. And so let me begin with just a short story. A few years ago, I was talking with an individual who had a lot of life experiences. You could just take a range of things, traveled a lot, been in accidents, had bones repaired. Just physiologically you could take this person and you could say, what haven't you been through? Where haven't you had surgery? And as I was talking with this individual who happened to be a relative, he said, you know, the weather changes and I feel it. I can tell when a storm's coming in because my bones, my muscles start to ache and there's pain. And it's an interesting thing when the weather changes, I physiologically feel it and I think about how attuned we are to our bodies or misattuned we are to our bodies because we work with individuals. Marianne, who honestly, if you went inside, where do you feel that tension? Oh, what do you mean and they don't know? And then there's other individuals? It's like instantly it's right here on my chest. Or it's in my stomach or my gut, or it's in my neck. Well, when life events occur, do we pause and listen to our bodies? Because I think there's some of the best instruction we can have. When we stop and listen to what our body's telling us.

Dr. Skinner, I agree with you a hundred percent. And I think it's important to also recognize most of the time, we are surviving. So when we look through this polyvagal lens, when we're in our ventral state, we're calm, we're connecting. We're at peace with the world and ourselves. But when we're in a fight or flight or freeze, our prefrontal cortex isn't always online. But we're not thinking, we're not consciously noticing. Hey, what's going on with my body? I have no idea if my heart is beating or my. I'm breathing faster. All I know is I gotta get out of here or I'm shoring up for a big fight here. And so I think part of our conversation here is as we're talking about what's happening to our body. It's important to also recognize we're not always connected to our body. Especially if we're in that fight or flight or free state.

Right. Is that a problem?

I think it's survival. And the reason why I say that is I'll talk to clients who are going through things that from the outside, when I hear them, it's just like, how are you still standing? Oftentimes we don't see trauma. Like in this moment, I'm having trauma. If we're hit by a car, maybe. But we're not thinking, I'm in trauma right now. Usually we're thinking, oh, I've got a lot of pain and what do I need? Where are my kids? Who's going to help me? We're just trying to problem solve. And so we're not really consciously thinking. I'm in a trauma state right now, and here's what's going on inside of my body. We're not super attuned internally.

I don't think I think about Peter Levine's work. He's a somatic experience specialist, meaning he does a therapy that's learning to listen to the body. And he shared one of the most profound experiences in his book Waking the Tiger.

Waking the Tiger.

And he talks about a personal experience where he's hit by a car. And when you've been trained in listening to the body, trained in listening intently to the body, how does he respond? And he shares that in his book Waking the Tiger. And it's so interesting to me that probably the best way to say it is he had to learn to listen to his body and how to respond to a traumatic event. But how many of us, when we have that event, like you said, we don't even think about a Marianne. Because as he talks in that book, after being hit, remembers the sirens coming and two voices. One was a paramedic who was off duty, who was yelling embarking orders, don't move. And asking his name and just completely overwhelming him, where finally had the wherewithal to say, I won't move, if you will just leave me alone. Contrast that with a nurse who comes up and the smell of her perfume, he says, and her soft voice and the calming influence that has on my body. And then he said, I kind of went out with that. And then the next I think I hear is the paramedics or the ambulance coming, and then I'm lifted on a gurney. Must have passed out. Now he's in the ambulance, and he talks about this experience where he felt a strong urge to raise up his left arm, and. And so he did. And. And then he goes through this flashback of seeing a girl teenage driver, and he's thinking, stupid girl ran through this crosswalk and hit me. Beige car. He sees that whole event run through his mind. And then all of a sudden, some of that tension in his body left because he put his left arm up, and now he's doing that, and then he wants to put his right arm up. And he also has this flashback of putting his hand up to protect his head from hitting the tarmac. And I think about that experience left, up, right, moving my hand, grateful for my hand. And that movement. He said as they measured his heart rate, it took his heart rate down from where they put him onto the gurney to put him into the amount heart rate had gone down significantly just with those movements. And then he says to the paramedic who's in the ambulance, he says, what's my heart rate? And he said, well, it's like in the 80s or something. He said, thank goodness I won't be getting ptsd.

Yeah.

What an interesting thing. There's something about the body moving. And I wonder how many times when we're in a state of trauma, we freeze, we don't move, we don't know what to do. And so I often work with my clients by asking a question. When you are in a state of stress, what does your body want to do? And that's really the question I'm inviting you, our listeners. A state of stress could be anything from being betrayed to acting out, to having health issues, to feeling stress from work or finances or with the holidays coming up with the holidays. The stress of that, what is your body feeling and experiencing? What's happening inside and what does it want to do?

I want to comment on two things that you're talking about. One of the things that I think is really important from, from Dr. Levine's work is he talks about animals. Just before animals are going to be killed, the body gives a mercy gift of a natural anesthesia which numbs. And that happens to humans as well. That's when we talk about that freeze state, the fight. Fight or freeze, that's our body preparing for death. It shuts down. And so when you're talking about what happens when we're stressed, what's our body doing? What I understand is we have a lot of cortisol that shoots into our bloodstream. It's a neurochemical. So our body is created to keep us safe and to help us function. So we have this stress neurochemical, cortisol, that shoots into our body, into our bloodstream. And you can correct me if I've got this wrong, but my understanding is cortisol is made for a short term, like lift the car off of the baby, an emergency, superhuman strength, kind of like, here we go. But oftentimes when we have prolonged stress, our brain gets flooded with cortisol and it doesn't get soaked back up. And so our brain is just swimming with all of this extra cortisol because we've got so much stress. So this actually creates like this sluggish, like, I don't want to function, I'm depressed, I don't want to get out of bed, I don't want to move. Is that your understanding? Have I got that right?

Well, cortisol in and of itself actually puts us into that fight response where we've got to do something. But we have limitations. And when we're low on cortisol, our bodies are going to be more sluggish because we've, so to speak, depleted the energy that's inside of us. So it would make sense to me that once that flow has been through, if you're in a constant state of stress, you're going to be more sluggish. We also know that when you have higher levels of cortisol. Your body is less likely to process and digest food.

So then we have, like, metabolic issues.

We don't sleep as well.

Yeah.

Right. And so when I asked the questions from thousands of betrayed partners who've known about a partner's betrayal and been living with the symptoms of PTSD that we've outlined in previous episodes, the most common answers I've known for over a year, but more people have known for two and three and four and five years. And so what does that do? That taxing influence on the body of a constant state of stress? It's not something that we're programmed to live with. That's not how our bodies are designed.

Yeah. And that's that numbing that I was talking about earlier, that our body just.

Is numb, wants to shut down.

Yeah. There's too much. I can't deal with it. So I'm just numb. I don't feel anything at all. And I think that goes back into our earlier conversation about, hey, what's going on with your body? I don't know. I've been in such a constant state of stress for so long, I have no idea. I'm so disconnected from my body because it's screaming at me. It might scream at me, but I can't hear it because I've just been surviving.

Yeah. And one of the things we always do when we do couples intensives or we do betrayal trauma intensives, is we have the trauma informed specialist come do yoga. And I'll never want to replace that because the effectiveness of it. I've had many people say, I haven't felt that relaxed in years. And so the benefit of just slowing down and letting your body get into a safe state, that's just a foreign concept for many individuals who've been in a chronic state of stress. And so when we are in that, whether it's betrayal or work related or financially related or dealing with a child who's dealing with whatever challenges that they are and you're trying to help them, whatever the situation. When you're in chronic stress, Marianne, the body still needs to find a way to reset, to feel calm, or find a place of calmness so it can do its natural things. Digest food, relax sleep, and then that influences the mental health. It influences your energy throughout the day. Without it, we are in deep doo doo. Can I say that on the podcast?

That was fantastic, Dr. Biskin. That's not where I thought you were gonna go, but I. I have two branches on this, two places that I want to look at with this From Peter Levine's work, he also talks about animals after they have been in this state, kind of this frozen state. One of the things that they do is they get up and they usually shake their whole body. I have a dog, and periodically he'll just shake everything. And when they shake, it's a reset. The whole body is resetting. And in Peter Levine's work, he talks about, after something happens, moving and listening to your body and saying, what is it that my body needs to do next? And that's where he said he threw up his arm, and then he threw up his other arm. And when he did that, he was completing the succession. The scene of that girl hitting him came back. And we've talked about the Zeigarnic effect, but it's kind of putting all the puzzle pieces together. So listening to our body and saying, okay, what is it that my body needs here? So there's a challenge. We're talking about being frozen or shut down. And I know that I'm saying, like, hey, now, listen to your body. That's foundational. But also, getting up and moving is really important. However, I also want to be very clear. If we're talking about the holidays or any time of your life and it's stressful, I want to be very clear that I'm not saying, like, hey, go do more, because that's the opposite of what we're saying. So we have to be able to listen and say, do I need to slow down or do I need to get up and move? I'll never forget, I had read this several years ago, and I finished my very last paper for graduate school, and I was like, I'm so excited. So we went to the batting cages because I wanted to hit something. That was my final. I'm done. And my daughter had a ball hit her finger, and it split her finger open. I went with her into the bathroom to clean it up, and she fainted. And then we said, hey, get up and let's move. Let's walk around. And I was basing that on, hey. Dr. Levine says, after you've had trauma, you need to get up and move. So we went outside, and we were having her walk around in the parking lot. She thought it was the worst thing ever. She was like, I just fainted. I should not be up walking. And I was sure that was the right solution for her. But as I look back, what she says is that may not have been the solution for what she needed. So I share that, just because I think we need to also be wise in Looking at, do I need to move? Maybe it's just lifting up my arm. Maybe it's not going out and walking in the parking lot, but do I need to slow down or do I need to start moving?

And that answer to that question is going to be unique to every individual in every situation. I remember reading another part from the somatic experience where people have had some kind of injury, fallen down, broken, something, and the best that they have found is they have to allow them to go at their pace and allow them to, okay, I'm now ready to move. And that part of it is an interesting one to hear because it's letting the person turn inside and say, what is it that I need? So to our listeners, let's move to a specific assignment, if that's okay. Marianne, can you give our listeners assignment? And I do this often with myself, so I'll give it to myself as well. I want you to pause for a second and just notice in your body any tension or tightness or what you may. We may refer to as stress. Just notice it in your body and give yourself a score between 0 and 10. And this exercise I do frequently in my office with clients. I do it myself just to understand my own stress levels. So on a scale between 0 and 10, if I just pause for a second, said, okay, where am I feeling stress? Is there tightness, tension? Where's it at?

So zero. Like, there's no tension.

I'm not feeling it at all. As relaxed as possible. And if I said it right now, I'm probably, right now, I'm actually pretty good. I'd say I'm probably a three. And to our listeners, whatever your score is, what if I could tell you in about three minutes, I could take it from whatever it is, and I can take it at least down one degree or at least that. But if not, maybe two or three, maybe even four, Would you be interested?

And if I were listening, I'd be like, okay, I will now have this on replay, and I will use this section for the rest of my life.

Great. I hope you will. I hope you will. And here's why, Marianne, because what I know to be true is that this is effective with about 80 to 90% of individuals, this simple breathing exercise. And what happens is when you teach it to people and they're like, that's too easy. Well, let's just try and see what happens. And so universally, when I do this, about 80 to 85% of people are like, well, what just happened? I'm feeling more relaxed. It's really a simple breathing exercise where for three minutes you just set your timer on your phone or watch or whatever your timer is. And first of all, you can't do this wrong, really important concept, can't do it wrong. And all you're going to do is you're going to breathe in through your nose for about a four to six count and you're going to hold it for a second or two and then you're going to breathe out hard.

For.

Six to eight count. And you're going to try to just focus on the breathing, right? Air coming in, coming out hard through the mouth, in through the nose, out through the mouth, back and forth, back and forth. That's what you're trying to do. Now in that three minute period of time, there's a high probability that your mind's going to start wandering, it's going to start thinking about this, it's going to start thinking about that. Things I got to do, got to cook this, I got to pay this bill, Whatever, whatever it is you're thinking about, just gently come back to your breathing and just focus on the breathing as much as possible during that three minutes. When you're done with the three minutes, our next invitation is really to just pause, notice the tension in your body. And in 80 to 85% of people, they're going to see that their score went from whatever it was, it went down. So what happened, Marianne? Why would it go down?

I love this tool because what it's doing is we're coming from wherever we're at into the present. When we have to stop and focus and we're counting and we're being very intentional, we're slowing down our breathing most of the time. Well, not most of the time, all of the time we're breathing, but most of the time we're not thinking about our breathing. And so when we start to focus on what's happening right here, right now in our body, it engages our parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest part of our body. And so that makes a lot of sense to me. This is a tool that we use oftentimes. And I love that nature has given us a built in tool that we don't have to worry about carrying it in our pocket. It is just with us. Our body is equipped to help us just when we're breathing.

So, Marianne, I want to address two things here. The person who said, I do that and my stress goes up. What's wrong with me? And nothing's wrong with you. What's happening in your situation is when it's calm, your body has been trained to watch out. There's a tiger, There is something out there that could get me. And so in calmness, your brain is more likely to feel a threat rather than a calm feeling. So in essence, what your body's doing is saying, it's calm, where's the problem?

Right.

And that's not atypical. Like I said, there's gonna be 10, 15% of, maybe even up to 20% of individuals who in that quiet space, their mind starts feeling more anxious. What we wanna say there is, okay, your body's saying, I'm feeling anxious now. Great. Next question. What am I anxious about? So you start to give it a voice. Listening to your body, listening to what it's teaching you. And then you might try a different type of exercise, like a vagus nerve exercise. Like the basic exercise. If you're not familiar with basic exercise, helps access the vagus nerve. And in Google, just type in the basic exercise. And there's a perfect example of how to do this three minute exercise that can intentionally access your vagus nerve and help you feel in a calmer state of mind.

I was recently looking at some work of Dr. Levine's, and one of the things he talked about was music. He talked about singing. And when he's talking about breathing, breathing out, he often says, if we can put our hand on our lower abdomen, and as we breathe out, he says that we say vu. So like, And there's something about the parts of the brain that, that engages. Singing and speaking are different parts of our brain. And as it engages this part of our brain, it's using our voice, but it's also using sound. There's a power that comes from that as well. And so if you want to up this exercise just a little bit, bring some sound into it, put your hand on your abdomen, you're bringing your hand present. So your mind's saying, oh, my hand is down here and it's connecting. It's also a very reassuring kind of like giving yourself a hug. And so as you're doing that, you're exhaling that. And it puts this exercise on steroids.

Yeah. And multiple exercises could be given to help access the vagus nerve. But really what that's doing is saying, okay, when my body's feeling anxious, my body's feeling stressed, how do I get it to calm down? And that's really, really the strategies that we want you to incorporate. Because normally in our culture today, anxiety is one of the leading indicators and leading issues of mental health that we struggle with as a society. But really, anxiety is the body's way of saying, I don't feel safe. That's what it is. I mean, anxiety is the body saying there is a threat somewhere. And with anxiety, we're simply saying, okay, let's see if we can access the vagus nerve to give you a sense of being in control rather than your body feeling like there's a threat. And I have to deal with. I have to do something. With the polyvagal theory approach, we're simply saying there may be threats out there, but in this moment, this is my calm place. This is my place where I can relax. And everybody needs a calm place, a safe place for them so their body can, so to speak, re. Energize, reignite some of that energy that's maybe been lost to the stress and the worries and the anxieties.

Yeah. One of the things I think that's so important here, and I want to make sure we talk about this in this podcast, because for me, when I think of Peter Levine, I always think about a story that he shares. He says there was a girl, a client who came to him, who she'd been to so many therapists, and she'd seen so many people and just hadn't been able to help. And he said, hey, let's notice your body. What does your body want to do? And I think this is a key part that we forget to, like, actually say, hold on a second, let me see if I can go in and notice what does my body want to do right now? And whatever the situation was that she was dealing with, she said, right now my legs want to run. And so he had her sit in her chair, and she just ran and put her legs back and forth back as fast as she could. And as she did that, her body was completing what it didn't get to complete. And I think that's the essence of the somatic. As we're talking about the somatic. Oftentimes we get stuck without completing. We have the energy stuck inside of us of some emotions that didn't. They weren't able to flow through and work through. And so saying, what does my body want to do right now? This is a tool I use in session with my clients a lot of times. Let's check. What does your body want to do? How does it want to move? And if I'm in a place where I can't necessarily move my legs, like I'm running, I can visualize it. I can go Internally, and I can see myself running. And that allows our body to release the tension that's trapped there, the emotional energy that got stuck there.

Two examples come to mind on this issue. The betrayed partner on D Day has a traumatic event. Their body stores that event often because they don't know how to fully express it, or they don't know what to do. They don't know what to say. They don't have the details, they don't have the story. And so that event is often one of the more physiologically speaking, I think that's where the trauma is stored. Often in D day type of events, It's, I feel trapped in this. I don't know how to best respond, and sometimes I don't know how to respond.

One of the examples that I think is really helpful is if I take a spring and I let go of it, like I stretch it out and I let go of it, it's going to just boing all around the room until all the energy is gone. And Peter Levine talks about, that's like our emotions. When we have experiences like being betrayed, we have all of these emotions that hit us. And it's like that spring, all of that energy is inside of us. And that's what we're talking about when we're saying, hey, let out that energy. Hey, let out that emotion. This is what we're storing. It's there.

And when you say, let it out, let's be clear here, There needs to be a proper place to put it. But sometimes I want my spouse to take it. They can't because they're dealing with their own shame. Which gets me to another part of this example. And this is why I think couples struggle so much in the beginning after discovery. So physiologically, from being discovered, whether your spouse caught you, whatever they caught you doing, or whatever you revealed to them, whatever that story is, we often see the physiological response to shame of being caught. And if you think about the visceral response of shame, it's the body curling up, it's the body collapsing, so to speak, Physiologically, what does that feel like? So. So if you really think about the shame of being discovered physiologically, what is that? That's what we're trying to accomplish, is help them understand their own story, their own physiological response. Because I've often found individuals, when I go back and look at their story, the shame of their first discovery, and I discovered pornography or I discovered the sexual experience, and sometimes there's so much shame from those early life experiences that it's almost like it's been with them for sometimes decades, have not resolved because it's in the body. That initial experience or those initial events that were, I would call sexually traumatic because they weren't ready to deal with them.

As you say that, Dr. Skinner, I'm just reminded of some work that I did personally through art. And it was on my first D day. And just what you're talking about, I slumped to the floor, I curled into a ball, and I stayed there probably for hours, just like, I don't know what to do. And when I did my art session, focusing on this specific event through art, we go in and after we worked through letting all the energy out and all the emotions out, once we work through that, we also rewrite that story. And my rewriting my story was going up the stairs and going outside. And as simple as that, what my body needed to do was to get up and move and go outside from that frozen shutdown and closed pace. But shifting that also, I want to make sure it's not just this internal focus. What I'm trying to say is I know that when I've shared this here before, when I feel certain things happen, my kicker comes out, my third grade kicker comes out, my body wants to kick. And so if I can listen to that and say, hey, my somatic response to this right now is, I want to kick something. So am I going to kick a hole in the wall? That's probably not going to be in my value system. But can I go get a ball to kick? What can I kick safely? Because my body is saying, I feel like I need to kick something. So it's. It's not saying like, hey, Marianne, that's kind of dumb. That's really childish. You're not a third grader anymore. I can say, hey, my body is wanting to let this out some way, and this is the natural solution that my brain's giving me. So find a way to do that in a healthy space that doesn't harm people.

So incredibly important, what you just said. Take out the judgment. What is it that my body's trying to do? Yeah, what is it? Because your body's trying to do some thing. What is it?

And it's just letting that energy, that tightened spring of emotion, my body wants to let go. It wants it to come out somewhere.

The researchers have found that trauma is stored in the body and it is not talked out. Peter Levine says, we don't talk trauma out. The body releases the internal tension. It releases it from self. So when I see clients in high levels of shame, high levels of trauma, even the anxiety. When their body can release the tension, they are like, oh, this feels so good. And to me, that's what we're trying to help people be aware of. When your body's aware of a calmness that maybe you haven't felt, a relaxation that you're like, I miss this feeling. That's when we're making good progress.

And in the Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, which is, I think, one of the seminal books on trauma. He talks about, yes, our body holds onto that. We get sick when we don't let it out. And he talks about one of the best solutions, one of the best tools we can use for trauma is running marathons. And then he talks about, yeah, that's not something most people do. And so he recognizes that. But he also talks about women in countries where they've been war and they've been in refugee camps. Women getting together and singing together or dancing together or beating the drums. Sometimes we need other people to help us connect as we're doing that together. But he also talks about, as you referred to earlier, yoga, finding ways to move our bodies because it is our bodies that are carrying the trauma and that it needs to be released from. And so finding however that is, that it comes out of you, we've gotta find that release, and that's for all of us.

I honestly think it's all of us, Marianne, sitting in the chair that we do, listening to many challenges and adversities that people have been through every day. We, too, have to find ways to decompress, to let out the stories that we hear and to relax our bodies. And so this is not independent. This isn't unique to anybody. This is real. We all have to deal with it and learn how to do this.

So you're saying this is life.

This is life. We have to learn how to listen to what our bodies are teaching us. And your body's a really good instructor. If we listen, it really is. The body is incredibly designed. Designed incredibly. So, anyway, my invitation today is learn to listen to your body, Marianne. Your final thoughts today?

My final thoughts are gratitude. I am so grateful for my body. I'm so grateful for the knowledge and the wisdom that all of our bodies carry. And this concept of slowing down and going internally and listening and saying, what do I need right now? That's just such a miraculous gift. Because it's not something I was taught. It's something that I've learned through research through, like Peter Levine and Bessel. Vander Kolk's work. And so if you haven't been doing this, if this is new to you, I'll say welcome. This is an exciting place to say, what is my body trying to help me with? Because that's what it's doing every day. And so slowing down, listening to myself. And I think as I often close with self compassion, giving myself space and grace, it's okay if my third grade kicker comes out. As long as I'm kicking pile of pillows or some cushions or something, it's okay. That's fine. But giving myself kindness and love and recognizing, as you said earlier, this is life. We are all trying to get through this and make sense of it. And the more we can be kind to ourselves and kind to others, I think the better our journey will be. So thank you.

Thank you. And for me, my final thoughts are a key indicator of your healing, of recovery of just your body. Being in a better space is a sense of calmness. You will physiologically feel a calmness inside of you. Not always. I like the phrase that Deb Dana uses, glimmers. And when we've been in elevated stress for extended period of times, we all need glimmers of a body being. This feels good. This feels the way I want to feel. So that's my final thought.

Can I add one more?

Yeah.

I think what you're talking about is intentionality. I think we have to be intentional to say, how can I let this out? We sometimes need to look for those glimmers or we'll miss them.

Yeah. All right. Thank you for being with us today. If you have not yet signed up for the second annual Human Intimacy Conference, we have an incredible sale going on right now. 50 off. That's the upon. We encourage you to join soon. The discount will expire at the end of December. And so we encourage you to sign up as quickly as possible and give your relationship the gift of learning from some of the leading experts in healing from sexual betrayal, infidelity, and how to create better, deeper relationships as you move forward in your life. So that's our invitation. 50% off is the coupon code. And Marianne, thank you so much for your time.

Thanks, Dr. Skinner.