What does true somatic healing look like when trauma is held in the nervous system and stored inside the body? In this deep and illuminating episode, Jeanne Willson sits down with Somatic Doctor Brian Tierney to explore the science, psychology, and lived experience of releasing emotional pain through body-based healing.

We dive into nervous system trauma healing, somatic psychotherapy, and how trauma lives in the body long after the event has passed. Discover how somatic trauma processing techniques support trauma nervous system regulation, emotional release through somatics, and long-term body-mind healing for anxiety, depression, and chronic overwhelm.

Brian shares insights on body-based trauma release, trauma stored in the body, and ways to begin releasing repressed emotions somatically. Together we explore the power of the mind-body connection healing approach that integrates awareness, movement, regulation, and presence.

This conversation is rich with insights for trauma professionals, healers, coaches, and anyone committed to their own recovery. If you are curious about somatic nervous system restoration, trauma release that goes beyond talk therapy, or embodied healing that reconnects you with safety and wholeness, this episode is a life-giving place to begin.

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Welcome everyone to today's episode.

I'm thrilled that you're here and I'm also thrilled to have Dr.

Brian Tierney.

He likes to be called Dr. B. He is a somatic doctor and a somatic coach,

so I'm excited to learn more about.

That and about how he helps his clients.

So welcome to the show, Dr. B. Thanks, Jeannie.

Good to see you.

Always good to see you.

So tell us a little bit about what is a somatic doctor or a somatic coach?

Yeah, somatic just means body.

So I'm a body mind specialist, you know, so we have, in the west, we have this

way of separating the body and the mind.

And a somatic coach or somatic psychologist is all about helping people

to reconnect the body and the mind.

For example, if you have really bad posture in your slouched all the

time, it's harder to be confident.

And I'm being literal here.

I'm not being metaphoric.

Yeah.

No, absolutely.

So tell us a little bit about your journey.

How did you end up becoming a somatic doctor or coach?

So when I was doing my bachelor's, I started to get a lot of anxiety

and that anxiety showed up as a somatic symptom in my throat.

And it felt like I needed to cough up a FR ball or something like that.

It wasn't until I met some somatic folks and did some body work and did some

healing that I understood that was a lot of repressed grief that was stuck there

in my throat, which is often the case for us men being enculturated into if

you cry or whatever, that makes you win.

So I needed to cough up the fur ball.

And the fur ball was basically like a lot of repressed grief.

From growing up and where I grew up here in Minnesota, I'm here in the woods.

It's a bit cold, but one of the things with the kind of northern states and

the kind of Midwest states, everybody's repressed in different ways, but

there's unique ways of getting.

Getting repressed here.

So it's like a deep freeze to the emotions and you need to thaw them out over time.

And so again, freeze.

It's not a metaphor.

It gets frozen in the tissue of the body.

Like that cry, the urge to cry gets swallowed and bitten down.

And we're talking about the neuromuscular.

The neuro musculature of the larynx in the jaw.

We're not talking metaphor here.

Tell us a little bit about how did you know that was there?

You obviously were having the anxiety and then you went to a

coach, and then did they say, Hey, you got trouble with your throat?

No, I had to piece it together on my own.

These days, somatics is out there in the world and.

If you search for it, you might run into some more clinical language

like somatic symptom disorder or functional neurological Disorder.

And so if you did internet searches for like weird somatic symptoms and

you've gone to a medical doctor and the medical doctor is okay, we've run

our diagnostics, you seem to be okay.

But then meanwhile, you still, you're feeling this symptom.

That's when you go to see a somatic psychologist.

Because we're pros at being able to translate and to dig into what

is the symptom trial, what are the psychological elements or what's

repressed and how is stress being held in the body in patterned ways?

So for me, it was just like I needed to piece it together for myself and

go from practitioner to practitioner.

When I started to realize that it was doing some men's work and meeting some

guys that weren't so repressed and guys that had access to their grief and so on.

And in short, being able to cry myself that the symptoms started to go away.

And then I started to meet somatic psychologists after that and I

was like, I wanna be one of those.

I love that.

Yeah.

How do you unravel that for your clients to help them better

understand what they're suppressing?

Somatic work often dovetails quite a bit with trauma resolution work.

Because trauma is housed in the body as well as not just in the brain or even

in the brain's predictive processes, which it very much is because the brain

is a predictive organ, and it's always predicting and projecting futures, and

predicting and projecting defenses that have been informed by a traumatic path.

So let's say I'm in a car accident.

My body goes into a field position as the body does in defense.

If that trauma isn't cleared, then the body and brain will continue to predict

and project circumstances where we have to get into the fetal position.

And if you imagine that over decades, of course what's gonna happen, our posture's

gonna be affected, we're gonna be constantly protected and stuff like that.

And you don't want that.

You don't want that for your immune system.

You don't want.

For your psyche and it becomes structuralized in the body.

So all that to say is that there's a lot of overlap with trauma resolution work.

So I'm doing a lot of trauma processing in my practice.

In fact, that's why most people come to me.

'cause I'm a neuroscience professor as well.

So I know the neuroscience of this stuff.

I teach people the neuroscience of this stuff and basically help people

to retrain their nervous systems through trauma resolution work.

So what does that look like?

It looks like.

Often regressing to the traumatic memory.

And then based on my knowledge of neuroscience, I'm helping the body

to, and this is the, it's like a technical language, but we'll unpack

it and hopefully it'll be clear.

Release the thwarted impulse that is there lodged in the nervous system.

So when I say thwarted impulse, what I mean is that, I'll give you an example.

I was working with somebody that fell asleep at the wheel going 75,

and this was in the mountain, okay?

So they fell, fell asleep at the wheel, they're going 75, and the car flipped

over and got lodged in between a rock and a hard place, literally upside down.

So the guy was hanging from the seatbelt and he was just stuck there.

He couldn't move.

In fact, he passed out.

He woke up.

Long story short, when he came to, there was cops with the jaws of

life getting him out and he was all woozy 'cause he had hit his head.

And then there was this big scene that was around him, as you would expect.

Right.

This is a major accident.

There's a big scene, there's voice.

This is, he comes too.

He is unconscious.

It's scary and everybody's yelling and running around and nobody's there with a

quiet, calm voice to say, are you okay?

Hey, let's talk.

Hey, I get that you're afraid, and things like that.

The nervous system is trying to do a lot.

He's trying to orient to safety, and he didn't have that because

he didn't have a clear, calm voice that's there and there's various.

Impulses in the nervous system that are trying to achieve safety for him.

As we got into that regression, the impulse was to actually

run away from these people.

'cause even though they were trying to help, they were so overwhelming

to him that they weren't providing that orienting response, that

his nervous has been needed.

So what the thwarted impulse for him, actually, believe it or not,

was to run away from these people.

Go off into the forest or something like that so he could put himself together.

So that impulse, that thwarted impulse to run away was lodged in his nervous system.

And it was stuck together with the emotional material, which

was, and he was a guy, of course.

So a lot of times it's to cry.

Guys need to cry.

You know, when his legs came back online, it was like, okay, the impulse to run.

Let's imagine yourself running.

Go ahead and run.

Feel yourself running.

Go ahead and run.

And then that's all the brain needs to release the thwarted impulse.

And then what happens once we run to safety, the tears come out and then he

is crying and then the trauma starts to resolve from there because we're

releasing these impulses that the nervous system couldn't release at the time and

they primal natural impulses that we've essentially been enculturated out of.

That's fascinating.

So was he like in situations where when he got uncomfortable.

Did he like physically leave or mentally leave the situation?

Is that how it was affecting his?

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

The dissociation response.

That's the fancy word.

And that's often, if trauma is unresolved, that's often gonna be the case.

When things get intense in life, like when we're in conflict or some, and

stress goes high, if the trauma is unresolved, what will happen is that

person will go into dissociation and.

In this guy's case, it would be his legs, so he can't feel his legs, so he is gonna

be bumping around into tables more often and just getting a bit spacey or out

there, especially when things get intense.

So we could imagine him being in a conflict or something like

that, or being high stress.

And then what happens is he starts to bump into tables more with his

knees because his legs have shut off.

Because the thwarted impulse is there in the legs, and the legs just go offline

because it's like the body has a primitive memory of that moment and goes back in

time to that moment where his nervous system does not know how to orient.

And it's like kind of a boutique term or a niche term in

somatics is like a held charge.

And that's the language of the nervous system anyways, right?

Charge and discharge.

And that goes across scales from the single neuron level all the way

up to the entire organism, right?

So a held charge in the tissue, in the neuromuscular junctions and

neuromuscular dynamics that are just held there and, and can't fire.

But after.

The release of the thwarted impulse, then the legs are less

apt to dissociate the person who's less likely to become spaced out.

That's amazing.

Like he must have been so relieved 'cause he was probably terrified.

Did he understand that?

Yeah.

Body was reacting to the trauma he had or was he just thinking, I've

got something wrong with my hat, or something's not connecting.

We're not trained to think like this.

We're trained to think in specialist terminology.

So for him, actually the presenting condition was his gut.

Actually, his abdomen, he was having really bad digestive distress, but

his parents were researchers and they knew that something had changed after

the accident, so they found somatics.

But who's out there gonna be thinking naturally, especially

if you go to a specialist.

A physician that is, of course, they're gonna run their digestive system

diagnostics and they're not gonna be thinking, even though, honestly, when

I go in to see physicians and they ask me what I do and I tell 'em what

I do, they say, I could send you 60% of my clients or 60% of my patients

because they know they have a natural intuition about the body mind connection.

So he himself wouldn't have made that connection, but his parents as

researchers did make that connection.

And then his digestive stuff, it did clear up.

Oh, he must be so grateful for open-minded parents who do research.

For sure.

So tell me a little bit about how people who are listening and thinking, this

might be something that's affecting me.

What kind of signs, I know it probably manifests itself in different ways for

different people, but are there similar things that people will feel when

they should talk to someone like you?

Yeah, often your partners and people that are close to you a little bit more than

you, because we all have blind spots.

The brain has blind spots.

So I would say that if you have somatic symptoms that the medical profession

and physicians aren't helping you with.

Kind of ask your partners and your family members, Hey, what

do you think my blind spots are?

That's a courageous question, right?

What do you think my blind spots are?

And just prepare to receive the response in an undefended manner

and just take in the information.

You know what I mean?

So get curious and that might take you some time because it can be

hard to be vulnerable with the people that we're closest with.

And then just ask for that information.

You might find some really interesting stuff out if you ask that question.

Yeah.

So it's more talking to someone about how your blind spots, as in what

are you not paying attention to?

What are you trying to push aside when you should be moving forward?

So it's less physical per se, than mental.

Would that be accurate?

Yeah, it certainly puts us on the bridge between the body and the mind.

Another way of saying it, and maybe even more courageous, is where do you feel like

your blind spots almost inevitably lead us to defense strategies and defense pattern?

And what I'm saying here is that those defense patterns

are literally in the body.

They're in the armatures of the body and the defense.

Patterns, the way that we armor ourselves.

And that stuff can be read by somatic psychologists.

Questions like that put us on the bridge to like, how does the

body defend itself over time?

And of course, we're gonna invariably be led to the face and the jaw

because there's so much that we hold here in terms of aggression.

But we wanna defend ourselves, but we bite back what we wanna say.

We wanna say, screw you.

Stop talking to me that way.

And that's a defense pattern.

But if we're biting it back and biting it back and biting it back,

then it gets held in the jaw.

Then, for example, a person will have bruxism and they'll be grinding their

teeth all night long, but really it's just a charged up aggression.

They'll want to find its way out.

I have that, I think I've flattened all my teeth out because I've

been grinding them at night.

Yeah, for sure.

That's the sort of thing that we wanna address, right?

We wanna get a person out in a private location in nature, and we want to get

them to creatively express aggression so that you, they're not grinding down

their teeth or they're not, you know, blowing up in conflict and then, and like

a whack-a-mole or something like that.

The aggression that just goes down into the subconscious after that

and then pops up and then back down.

Okay.

So you gave us a little bit of insight.

So how do you work with your clients?

Do you try and upset them to get them to react?

Sure, yeah.

In short, yes, but in a kind of, I wanna upset people in a clinically appropriate

way, so we don't want to go too fast.

Another way of saying that is reflect their consciousness towards

where they're already upset.

You know what I mean?

So they're already upset.

That would be the assumption.

And I'm just a companion to help them to have a language for it

and give them some structure then.

So, yeah.

Uh, if you want to discharge a kind of hidden held charge in the nervous system,

then you gotta aggravate it a little bit.

And you even see that in marketing now, right?

There's actually an old relationship between marketing and psychology,

and you gotta agitate the problem.

You know that one Absolutely.

Problem.

You gotta agitate the problem and if you don't agitate the problem,

you're not in the right system.

Yeah.

And you can't motivate people to take action because they're not in enough pain.

Right.

Sad but true.

So do you only work in person with people or do you do like

online junior consulting?

I do online coaching worldwide.

Right.

Because in California, like if I'm doing systematic psychotherapy, which

is usually longer, more sustained work, psychotherapeutic work,

it's the longer trajectory there.

A coaching is just a different style.

It's a different skillset.

And I do, I offer that worldwide, online.

Okay.

Is there a certain amount of time that people work with you typically,

or does it depend on what they're struggling with and how deep that is?

Yeah, like in a world of efficiency, everybody wants five

steps to enlightenment by next week or something like that.

I think it's LER Lou.

That's hullabaloo healing.

Real healing takes time, but there are some efficiencies in the work.

Like for example, phobias and stuff like that.

I can sometimes clear a phobia in one session, like an elevator phobia or

vomiting phobia and stuff like that.

Those are the ones that are a little bit more efficient.

But for kind of complex trauma, I need three to five

sessions to really figure out.

What's going on here?

Usually we'll be seeing results for sure by session number three,

but to have a thorough going assessment, I need three to five.

A lot of folks, if they do eight sessions, they're gonna

see some significant progress.

Yeah.

I think equate that to, you said there isn't a five step to

enlightenment, there's no five steps to making millions of dollars either.

By tomorrow for sure.

Back to marketing again.

This is amazing and I am so grateful for people like you who are helping people who

really need it and maybe don't even know that they need it, or they're suffering

in ways they don't need to be suffering.

I know there's people listening who are saying, I love Dr.

B. I love what he's saying.

I think maybe the doctors I've been going to see are not helping me and

I'm still struggling with something.

What is the best way for them to reach out to you?

Yeah, so my brand is Somatic Doctor, S-O-M-A-T-I-C, doctor,

spelled out somatic doctor.com is the website Somatic Doctors on.

Also Instagram, and I also have a podcast called The Boundless Body, which is fun

for those of you that are philosophically inclined to nerd out about the body.

And I'm a neuroscience professor, so on the Horizon two, I do have

my book coming out next year.

It's a labor of law that took me about four years to write.

And you can sign up for my newsletter.

Just go to somatic doctor.com and you can sign up for the newsletter.

It's all self-explanatory and be in the pipeline to get updates and so on.

Do you wanna share the name of the book or do you not have that yet?

Visionary Somatics And what's the book gonna be?

It's an update to the trauma neuroscience, and it's for folks that

are trauma resolution specialists out there that wanna upskill and

get an actual update to the trauma literature, which is actually quite old.

So it's like a how to book for clinicians, but it's also a. Dive into philosophy.

Sociology it, it really is a challenging book.

It was meant to be written as a challenging book and

not a five steps to whatever.

It's not meant to be easy, and I'm not gonna apologize about that.

It's meant to challenge brains.

It's meant to challenge and which is good for brains.

Brains need to be challenged and it's also a how to book.

It's something else.

I'm quite proud of it.

It's pretty badass.

I love that when it comes out next year, if you send us a link to it,

we'll include it in the show note.

For now, we'll include for sure a link to your website so people

can sign up for your newsletter.

So I'm sure you'll be announcing it in there as well.

So last question I have for you is what I ask my guests.

If you could provide one tip to make the world a better

place, what would that Okay.

Practice, actively practice spontaneity, go out and play more

actively practice spontaneity.

That being distinct from impulsiveness.

Impulsiveness is you're impulsively dancing across the street, not

looking both ways spontaneously or actually dancing across the

street while maintaining safety.

I love that.

I love that.

And I'm totally on board with, we don't have enough fun and I think we should be.

Having a little bit more fun and being a little more playful and thinking back of

what you enjoyed when you were younger, and maybe even trying those again.

Dr. B, this has been fantastic.

I really appreciate you sharing so much about Somatics, educating us on what it is

and how you and people like you can help.

Other people out in the world.

So thank you for being my guest today.

Thanks, Jeannie.

It was an honor.

Thank you.

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