Somatic Memory

Welcome back, y'all. Today we are finishing up a very big conversation on memory. Last episode we talked about the neurology of memory, memory repression, how trauma impacts our memory. And today we're going to explore somatic memory. This conversation and this research has been huge for me to wrap my mind around and really had some profound impacts on understanding myself and my experiences. And so I hope this conversation resonates for you all because it's a big

one. It really is. It really is. And it's. The understanding of somatic memory has really helped to shape me as a spaceholder. And for someone who does work in altered spaces of consciousness has been really. It's been really life changing. I feel like it's a really new way of understanding, of trusting ourselves, right? Of deepening that relationship with the body in this whole

new way. When you understand somatic memory and what your body is communicating to you and developing that trust of what's real coming from your body and being able to hear that, to respond to it and to validate it in a lot of ways is really powerful. So welcome back to trauma rewired, the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what you can do to heal.

I'm your co host, Jennifer Wallace. I'm a neurosomatic psychedelic preparation and integration guide, and I am also an educator at the Neurosomatic Intelligence coaching certification. And I'm your other co host, Elizabeth Christoph. I'm the founder of Brainbase.com, comma, an online community where we train the nervous system to re pattern trauma and improve resilience. And I am also the founder of the Neurosomatic Intelligence coaching certification. Okay, yeah, let's dive into

somatic memory. It's so interesting. It's so very human and it really feels to have a somatic healing experience. It really does feel like a full embodiment experience. I know it best through psychedelic experiences, actually, and from witnessing a couple of psychedelic experiences from other people. I mean, like, what does it really mean for our bodies to

remember something? And so if you are not, and we're going to get into this in just a few minutes, a little bit deeper of the science and more explanation of this, but if you're not out of the age where your brain would have developed for you to remember the memory even, and even if your brain even decides that, oh, actually you're old enough to remember this, but am I going to let you remember it? Your body has been remembering it. Your body, it does remember it. Your body

has been. Your nervous system has been recording everything that's ever happened to you, ever. And so before our memories get recorded, we have somatic memory in the body. And so let's get back to how I discovered this in psychedelics. Because I think the draw to psychedelic healing is, in part, the. The visual aspect of it's what's talked about the most people do not talk about what we are about to get into or what I'm about to talk about, because people don't talk about the experiences

of the somatic journey. You only hear about the visuals. And that's. That's very hard and confusing for someone to live out their journey in a somatic way and have no visuals at all. In fact, I've, like, literally never heard anyone talk about this. And so, you know, as humans, our vision, our visual system, it sits at the top of our neural hierarchy. And our vision is the way that we trust an experience. It's the way that we trust our experience and the way that we have seen

something. And when we can see something, it makes the feeling of something more real. It almost validates the way that we feel inside. And so when we have to rely on our emotions and our experience coming from our body, relying on the feelings and the sensations coming from the body, that is harder to trust. That is much harder to trust. And part of our. Part of the protective response, the patterned response, is to protect ourselves from the

emotions. And so if we've had this long disconnect from our bodies, if we've been someone with chronic dissociation, when there's a pattern where it is dangerous to feel the emotions, to express the emotions, or when there is any danger in, I'm having a reaction, right? Like, this is a real time just for y'all out there to hear. Like, this is a real time response in my nervous system, in vocalizing this, this is the very first time. No one

is talking about this. I rarely talk about my psychedelic somatic experience. So just being full disclosure out there. So when our emotions are maybe dangerous to feel dangerous to express, when something is unsafe, that's a major threat to our survival, our real, legitimate survival from the perspective of our brain. And so we learn to repress, we learn to suppress, and then that's dangerous and threatening, because your brain's number one priority is your safety. And so that's not

just your physical safety, it is your emotional safety. And so to feel the sensations that come from your body and trust that, I mean, it is just such an important connection to develop and cultivate because there's so many people out there with complex trauma going out to heal themselves. And these deep somatic peak experiences with psychedelics that will walk away likely feeling more suicidal than they will feel healed because they'll have seen nothing and not be able to connect to the

feelings coming from their bodies. And so, from an NSI perspective, we work to prepare the nervous system before we go into these experiences. And this is why preparation is so

crucial. Integration gets a lot more play in the world, but it is so key to prepare your body to learn safety, to learn the cues, to get into some emotional processing, and really work to develop your interrogation receptive skills, work on the right correct toning of your, of your vagus nerve, and we look at all of the sensory input systems so that you are prepared for this full experience. It's scary af to have your psychedelic journey come on through your body

before it hits your visuals, if it ever does. Well, yeah, I relate to this so much because so many of my memories are somatic only. And so, as I've done many different types of healing, I have the experience of processing and healing in a somatic capacity. And that was very confusing at first because, like you said, we don't trust that knowing that information in the same way that I would trust visual images or cognitive memories that I can talk about and

verbalize. I had to really develop my interceptive skill and hearing, my instinct, and develop a relationship with my body where I trusted that memory for that processing to be possible. And then it was so interesting. As we were researching for this episode, I really began to understand a lot more why that was. And that has to do with how we encode memories, long term memories, specifically. So our hippocampus doesn't have the ability to form enduring

memories until we're about four years old. Babies and young children can only retain short term memories, but the neural pathways that encode those memories dissolve after a few weeks or months, and then the child forgets. So this is, again, we're diving into the science a little bit. Bear with us here. But this is important for those of us who have early childhood experiences. So short term and long

term memories are actually structurally different. The difference involves the activity of certain genes within those neurons of the memory pathway. So, in some cells, genes are activated, and in some cells, they're dormant. So, for example, some genes are active in kidney cells and others are active in liver cells. And genes make the proteins that

perform those specific functions. When dormant genes are activated or expressed in the cell, then the cell performs certain functions that it didn't perform before. Long term memories are created when certain dormant genes are expressed in the neurons of the memory pathway. And then these genes produce the proteins that keep the neurons in the pathway communicating with one another for a longer period of

time, maybe even a whole lifetime. And when neuron memories stay connected, the information in that pathway is retained. Neurons in short term memory pathways don't undergo that gene expression. These neurons have a limited supply of the proteins that keep the neurons communicating with one another, and proteins eventually run out, and then the neurons no longer communicate. And that's what happens when a memory is

encoded, and then the pathway is erased. And so in an immature hippocampus, like of a child, it can't make those long term memory pathways, they don't have the genes for that expression, which is why young children can only remember short term memories about people or places or things. And it kind of blew my mind because I was like, oh, those memories do not exist. They weren't encoded. They're not there for me to retrieve. And I know that, nevertheless, we can be damaged by

infant experiences that we can't remember. Right. We know from all of the stuff we talked about with attachment, children experience conditions that they can't remember that harm them, and they're still harmed even though they can't remember it. They still have those different reactions. And so we want to start to talk about, like, how do we make sense of that in terms of neuroscience? How do I understand how these experiences still impact me even if

I don't have the cognitive memory? And so, like, what I was talking about with my experiences, a lot of my biggest adverse childhood experiences were pre verbal, and I don't have the cognitive memory, but I do remember in my body, and I relive that somatically in pain and sensation and emotion. And when I'm connected to my body, I know what happened. But it has taken me a long time to trust that memory in my body, because without words and cognitive memories, it's hard to make sense

of. And it's been a real process to validate my own knowing and experience. Yeah. Yes. It's a real. Another level of healing. There's no separation. And we sometimes look at the body as something that is, like, separate from us, or we look at the mind, the body, the soul, as these

three major key points of us as humans. And, yes, you are those things, but everything is so intrinsically linked and woven together, and there are no boundaries between the emotions of your body and the way that you are experiencing the world right now as you even listen to this podcast. And just like we were saying in the relationship to body episode and healing that relationship, I mean, there's a whole episode. I definitely recommend in this moment

that you go back after this one and go back to that listen. And why it's so important to heal the dissociation when you're on this path. Who this conversation is getting me in so many ways. It's a deep one. It's a deep one. It's so big. It's so big. And it's like, not like I didn't

prepare for this, you know, I did. But it's like listening to it all and like, my body is taking it in and it's having memories of truths that this is truth, you know, and like that to be for someone like you just did, to try to put the somatic memory into words, like, my body knows that is true. My body feels seen and validated, and it automatically relaxes a little bit in the truth. And

I know that I have tools. I was just doing cranial nerve one for a moment after I did, after I was talking about the somatic psychedelic experience to regulate back in, to get grounded and present, because it's just such a big. It's a really big topic. Yeah. It's been so powerful to heal through the body. It really has. It really has for me, too. Let's talk about some of the ways that these memories do live in our body. Yeah. One way

is hormones. Interestingly, stressful situations arouse the sympathetic nervous system to initiate the f response. Your sympathetic nervous system activates adrenal glands to produce epinephrine and adrenaline, which then cause physiological sensations to our heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, vision, and hearing. All of this to sharpen. And it also activates cortisol to become alert, to convert also glucose to energy

for our skeletal muscles. And these prolonged stressful situations, they cause lasting impacts on muscle tension that could lead to pain, could lead to decreased range of motion or muscle use, muscle atrophy. All this is linked to disease. Diseases like heart disease, all the things we know about AcE scores, all linked to disease. And most important, the overproduction of cortisol, which actually suppresses our immune system. Yeah, that's all very related to how it impacts our HPA axis.

Right? Our past experiences, especially in development, shape how our HPA axis functions. Again, for those who haven't been listening for a long time, HPA is our hypothalamic pituitary axis. It's how our hypothalamus communicates with our pituitary gland to then release stress hormones through our adrenals. And so these experiences, they activate. They activate the HPA axis to generate a threat response, and that's what also leads to more

cortisol production. And if everything is functioning well and we also are in a safe environment where that threat can go away and we can come out of that high stress state, then those hormones should cycle back to the hypothalamus and stop that reaction. So we get activated, the hormones are released, the stress chemicals are released, and then our brain gets the signal. Okay, now resolve that and stop producing those chemicals. But if you can't

escape, you can't resolve the stress. It's that complex trauma, that developmental water that we're swimming in. Then you don't get the feedback. The cortisol feedback is unable to stop the activity of the HPA axis, and it remains an overdrive. And that can cause childhood anxiety. Depression causes cognitive impairment, inflammation in the brain, destruction of the muscles and the blood vessels with glucotoxicity. And so in childhood especially,

it's linked to these developmental issues. But this can happen throughout our life as we stay stuck in states of chronic stress. Another way is through opioid activity. Endogenous opioids. Under normal conditions, opioid activity depends on social relationships. If we are abandoned or neglected, opioid activity plummets. When we are with people we love, the brain washes with endogenous

opioids, and we feel joyful. If rats are separated from their mother and kept in isolation, the number of opioid receptors in the brain decreases, and they continue to be anxious into adulthood. People who suffer from depression and suicidal ideation have depleted opioid receptors in the brain. Addicts who suffer from lower receptors crave relief that opiates provide. To further the example of the rat separations from our mothers, it increases sympathetic nervous system

activity. The HPA axis activity is sensitive, and it decreases in opioid activity. Yeah, in some ways, it's like the experience is remembered by the body because of the way that it affects the development of the nervous system in the brain. Right. I'm shaped by these childhood experiences and then moving through the world now with a reactive nervous system, a sensitive HPa axis, decreased opioid receptors. All of that is remaining in the patterns that exist in my nervous system and how it

functions. And this creates the health outcomes that we see with adverse childhood experiences. The link between having more ACE scores and having higher states of mental and physical decline or mental and physical health outcomes. And so the brain and the nervous system, remember, quote unquote, because they're actually shaped and created by these experiences that then drive our present day reactions, how we process information

about the world and how we respond to stress. And so our nervous system is patterned and now reacts to the world differently. And so we really do have to teach it, because, again, I don't want everything to be so heavy and overwhelming to people. We are. Even though this happens, we are still neuroplastic and we are still changing. When we

know how to work with the system, we can create that change. We just have to be able to teach our nervous system new ways to process and express and to create regulation and safety. And we can do that through intentionally training and working with the nervous system. Absolutely. If we can get wired, if we were wired, if we have been wired, we can get rewired, and then we can have the

agency of doing that ourselves. Like we, that's why NSI is, once again, is just so vital and important for everyone to understand. Like you can create. You're not stuck. You can still dream the dream, live the dreams that you are dreaming of, like you can create even. What if that safety means just going to the grocery store and

feeling okay about that, or going to a family dinner? Like, whatever safety means for you, whatever performance or whatever you vision in your life like that is all made possible in your nervous system. And to be able to re pattern it is like the greatest agency that one can have, honestly. It changes how we react and how we recall memories and encode new ones. We would not be here. The memory of using my voice would not be good. The memory of

being seen and what it was like to feel seen. In my younger years, that wasn't safe. So it wouldn't be safe now to be here, seen and heard. If I did not do this work through my nervous system, we're gonna dive. A little even deeper still. So I'm excited about the next part. This part is deep and something that I'm really just starting to explore, but is important when we're talking about long term health, health outcomes in our memory.

So we want to talk a little bit about cellular health and cellular memory. So, big picture cells are these fundamental units of life. It's the basic structure, the functional unit for all living organisms. And everything is made of cells. All of me, all of you is made of cells. We have blood cells, bone cells, fat cells, nerve cells, liver cells, lymphocytes, bronchial cells, vascular cells, like everything that's in my body is created of

cells. There are about 200 different types of cells in our body. And they all work together to make our body and to contribute to our overall health and functioning. And another way that trauma impacts our body and our health is that it creates a chronic stress load that impacts our cellular health. And one of the biggest ways that it does that is through our energy

production. Because each of our cells has mitochondria, which are just these tiny little parts of our cell that are critical to our metabolic health, because they produce ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which is the primary energy currency of our body. Without efficient ATP production, we can't perform even the most basic functions optimally.

So if you think of ATP as the fuel that powers your body's engine, when your cells convert nutrients into ATP efficiently, you can maintain your energy levels, you can support body functions, you can keep your metabolic processes running smoothly. But when that process is not going well, when it falters a little bit, it can lead to metabolic dysregulation, which then has a big impact on a host of health issues. Someone that I've been reading and listening to is Doctor Casey means. And she has a

great book talking about mitochondrial health. And it's relevant to basically all disease states, talking about how all of our health outcomes are really impacted by our mitochondrial health, including our mental health. And so that has just a huge impact. The stress on our cells ability to produce energy and how that impacts our immune system, chronic inflammation. And so that stress is living out in our bodies

by the impact that it has on ourselves. In that way, neuropeptides and emotions also play a huge role in cell function. Tiny molecules called neuropeptides are the secret messengers of your body's communication system. Doctor Candice Pert uncovered that there are over 60 types of these neuropeptides bustling around like carriers in a busy city, connecting to every cell in our bodies. And so think of your brain as the city's hub. These neuropeptides, they don't stay put. They travel

far and wide. They link your brain cells, immune cells, and all of your cells, all of the other cells. And they do this through special doorways called receptor sites, delivering crucial messages from your brain to your body, and vice versa. And here's a fascinating twist to that. The type of neuropeptides that reach your cells can change based on your emotions. Whether you're happy, sad, stressed. Your feelings dictate which neuropeptides are on the move.

This emotional orchestration can impact your health, determining if you stay well or if you catch a cold. So the next time you feel your emotions shift, remember that there's, like this whole world of communication happening inside of you, shaping your well being. And so our memories and our emotional experiences affect us at a cellular level. They affect our cellular function. This is where your gut health is really going to come into play,

too, because we're going to explore that a little later on in the season. But, like, I just want people to pin that if they're in their own gut journey right now. Pin that for the gut health discussion. Absolutely. And then even deeper and more crazy and wild to think about is that there's this whole world of research now on cellular memory. And traditionally, memories were thought to reside only in the

brain. But there is a lot of credible new research that's finding that cells throughout our body, beyond the neurons in our brain, have capacity to store and retain information. This really challenges the conventional view of memory and expands that understanding of memory and behavior, because cellular memory theory says that traumatic experiences can be stored in the cells, and when we're unable to effectively process our experiences, they become stored as raw forms

of cellular imprints. So unprocessed traumatic memories can manifest in ourselves. And then because they're there impacting our cellular memory, it impacts our mental and our physical processes. And I just want to give some examples of this because it's strange to think about ourselves, each little individual cell having the ability

to remember things. And it's not like the cell has a clear cognitive memory, just like we don't experience that somatically, but they have memories that drive the way that they function, the way that they interact with one another. So they did some different studies on single celled organisms and how they could learn, and they found that, surprisingly, even single celled organisms could exhibit signs of memory, like, quote unquote

behavior. So they had these certain types of cells called centaur coeruleus cells. They're these little trumpet shaped single cell organisms, and they actually started to habituate, to touch. They repeatedly poked them, and after this repeated poking, it started to contract less, less readily and remembered to be less sensitive after a few hours. So it actually changed the way that it responded to that poking. And then they also did one with paramecium that they would have monitor.

And it started to, I think they were putting it in something where it had to escape, and it started to improve its escape time from capillary tubes through experience. So it was actually learning how to do that differently. And they had some paramecium that underwent sort of a pavlovian training, associating a metal wire with bacteria. And when they were, that metal wire was re presented. Even without the bacteria. Later, they still flocked to the wire

because they wanted the bacteria, which is a form of learning. It's a form of remembering. So each of our cells, the behavior of the cells can be shaped because in this different way of understanding, they have a memory that impacts how they function. It's really fascinating. And this is something,

the water component and water holding memory. This is something that I'm just starting to explore and learn more about, because as we were preparing for this conversation, I told Elizabeth, I was like, I really have this feeling, this knowing, this trust in my body, that the way that cells hold on to memory is because that they are composed of water. And water holds memory. We know that now, like, water is. Oh, my gosh, there's. There's so

much just to say about the element of water, but there's. There are a lot of discoveries now showing that water has memory, and we are 70% made of water. And so one could easily seem to draw conclusions that if water holds memory and we're made of water, and there's all sorts of neat, even experiments that happen from animals that are totally across the globe from each other, where one might start doing something and behaving in a particular way, and then across the world in another

city, you could see that same behavior going on. And it's because we really are, as humans, we are all connected by water, either by the water in our bodies, the water that really connects, literally, our land, and we're so uniquely made and shaped in water, in the water of our mothers. Like, everything about us is water. And so I'm not going to say too much on this topic because I know that it's just getting kind of broad, but we know that

tears hold unique memories. We've seen water studies now that you can yell at or praise your glass of water or even snowflakes now are holding memories. So we're really seeing that the ability for our own body's water hosts a complete store of information about our individual experience. It's so fascinating to think about. I love it. It makes so much sense that how would our bodies store trauma,

store memory? And it's like, yeah, it lives in our tissues, it lives in our muscles, lives here, and, like, and what's all that made of cells made up of water. Yeah. There's a great book, the fourth state of Water for people who are interested in exploring this a little bit more deeply. And there's also a really interesting lady on Instagram called Veda Austin, and she does incredible experiments with water that will just. They blow

your mind. Link her in the show notes, I'm. Going to check it out and check it out. Finally, I feel like we also have to touch on epigenetics here, because this is a huge and important component of collective memory and ancestral memory. And epigenetics is really the study of changes in gene expression that do not involve alterations to the underlying DNA sequence. These changes can turn genes on or off, and they are influenced by a whole host of environmental factors, like

lifestyle choices or experiences. And essentially, epigenetics looks at how your genes interact with your environment and how this interaction affects your health and your development. But generational trauma, also known as intergenerational trauma, refers to the transmission of the effects of traumatic experiences from one generation to the next. And this type of trauma could be both psychological and physiological, and it impacts the descendants of those who originally experienced the trauma.

And a lot of this comes from the changes in the genes and the gene expression. Yeah. Generational trauma can be transmitted through various mechanisms, including epigenetic changes, meaning that trauma can lead to epigenetic modifications that affect stress response, behavior, and health in descendants. Along the way, it can affect behavioral patterns. Traumatized individuals may develop certain behaviors and coping mechanisms that are

observed and adopted by their children. Family dynamics, a dysfunctional family dynamic and communicating patterns that stem from trauma can perpetuate stress and trauma across generations. And how about the impact on mental health? Descendants of individuals who experience trauma may have an increase of mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. And there's physical health effects.

Generational trauma can also affect physical health, potentially leading to chronic diseases and altered stress responses. So epigenetics provides a biological framework for understanding how generational trauma can be transmitted. Trauma experienced by one generation can lead to epigenetic modifications that are inherited.

Trauma experienced by one generation can lead to epigenetic modifications that are inherited by subsequent generations, influencing their gene expression and potentially predisposing them to certain health conditions and behavioral

patterns. Yeah, I mean, there's so many ways that trauma can be passed one generation to the next, just like you were saying from, because we pick up on those behaviors from our primaries, because then our primaries are operating in that state of dysregulation that then shapes our nervous system and these epigenetic

changes. And I feel like this is so much of what we talk about all of the ways that the nervous system is impacted and that it comes from our primaries and that's passed down from their primaries, and generational trauma, it really becomes our collective memory. And this collective memory impacts our brain development, our somatic experiences, our health outcomes, our physical health. And I feel like so many of us right now, our listeners, you and me, our clients,

people in NSI, like, this is what we're doing now. We're doing the work of moving through and re patterning that generational trauma healing for generations. And as we have talked about on here before, as we re pattern ourselves and there's a ripple effect in the generations that come after us, but also even maybe affecting back to the generations

that came before us. I definitely think so. I mean, even in the living generations, like when I think of my mom, all the work that I do, it affects her. I come from her. We are connected very deeply. And so in my own healing, it's affected that relationship so positively in what's, what's been possible in healing. And I really believe, like, when we go into this deeper work, we do affect the collective. It

makes a difference. It makes a huge difference what you do in your healing journey and how you express in the world. I mean, that's why we do all this nervous system work is like for agency, for sovereignty, for healing, for full self expression, for a voice to, you know, to not live in fear and to have this deep level of discernment of truth within myself and being able to question the beliefs that live in my body. I mean, are these my beliefs?

Where do these beliefs even come from? And like, what can I trust? And that all comes back to, like, having safety through the tools, safety through my nervous system, having a daily emotional processing practice, if that's what's necessary, but having the right tools to go into that. And I also love to work with people. So I a lot of times have someone else that holds space for me and that's re patterning, for someone to witness my rage or my grief and then to be able to watch me transmute that

into a new way of being. And all of what we're talking about, this reshaping, it takes a daily, consistent practice. It's not just about doing it this week. And even with the psychedelic experiences, which people are so called to, yeah, you can get a lot in one session, but it's going to really matter what you do in the weeks later coming, especially when it comes to neuroplasticity and getting back to, if we are able to wire, we are able to rewire, and that's going to take

effort. It's beautiful and big and scary at times. Yeah. I'm almost like at a loss for words, the magnitude of all of this that we talk about. And it's such a gift to be in a community, be with you, be with our clients and other practitioners that are thinking about these things, processing, doing this work. And I just want to say, too, it's possible for anyone, like you were saying, if we can wire, we can rewire. And there's lots of different types of

practitioners and lots of different modalities of healing. Allow yourself to be witnessed, allow yourself to be held and received as you go through some of this, and also work with your nervous system because it's a really important, have the capacity for all these other types of healing practices. I mean, there's an incredible wealth of practitioners. There's a whole database on the neurosematic intelligence website that you can connect

to. Yeah, there's all the resources that we have for you will be in the, will be in the show notes and go out there and do some infinity walks and add some executive fun training to that. Yes, me too. I see more and more through this conversation, like how important it is to work with the frontal lobe. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much for sticking through us today. Sticking with us. Thank you for listening. This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and

should not be considered medical or psychological advice. We often discuss lived experiences through traumatic events and sensitive topics that deal with complex development and systemic trauma that may be unsettling for some listeners. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice. If you are in the United States and you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health and is in immediate danger, please call

911. For specific services relating to mental health, please see the full disclaimer in the show notes.