Episode 41: Food Is Not the Problem. It's the Message - Somatic Eating, Trauma and Nervous System Healing with Stephanie Mara Fox

So to start us off, for someone who's never heard of your work before, how would you describe what it is that you do?

Yeah.

So basically throughout my own experience

in food and body image recovery, and then almost like two decades now of supporting others in their food and body image recovery, kind of hit me like a ton of bricks a couple years ago that I'm like, oh, my work is called somatic eating.

And that was obviously after years of being a somatic practitioner and getting my master's in somatic psychotherapy.

And I'm currently back at school getting my PhD in somatic psychology.

And And what I found first, just starting out as a health coach, was that my conversations kept going to some really deep places of all the associations that we have with food, the memories that we have with food, the reactions that we have around some foods.

I know just from my own experience, food has never just been food for me.

Even in my upbringing, food always meant something.

And so...

You know, in my experience and then what I saw in professional practice, I was like, food is so much more than just you eat it and you move on with your day.

And especially for those who have been navigating years and decades worth of emotional eating, binge eating, restriction, the binge restrict cycle, food noise.

I could go on and on.

Fill in the blank whatever food behavior you feel like you navigate in your own life that And I felt like once I started to learn about somatics, which I'll go into in a second of what that is, if anyone is new to that field as well, that was such a missing piece.

And it was a missing piece on my own recovery journey as well.

Of somatics, first of all, it means relating to the body distinct from the mind.

So most therapeutic modalities address kind of what's called top-down.

They address what the thoughts we are thinking to feel differently in our body.

And somatics is kind of like, but what about the body? So if we can address how we are feeling, it might send a different message up to the brain because the brain and the body communicate with each other through what's called the vagus nerve.

It's kind of like this highway of communication in our body.

So we don't want to create this duality of just mind or just body.

It's how do we get these two things to communicate well with each other? And somatic starts with the body, the nervous system, the felt sense, emotions, sensations, and that if we can build our capacity to be with our body and ebb and flow with what's showing up in our body, that's going to send a different message up to our brain to think different thoughts.

So kind of taking that, I started to see a lot of those that I was talking with had some kind of history of past trauma and that food came in as a way to help them regulate a dysregulated nervous system.

And to feel a sense of safety when they maybe have never felt that.

I know for a lot of people that I've worked with, sometimes when we start talking about safety, they're like, what are you even talking about? Like, I've never felt safe in my body from like the time that I've been born.