Body Magic
Understanding Somatic Trauma Healing with Elle Bower Johnston
This week, I invited Elle Bower Johnston to the Fat Doctor Podcast for a conversation about somatic trauma healing and the ways our bodies hold and process our experiences. May is Mental Health Awareness month, and even though we both agree that the term mental health has become quite commodified, we wanted to have a genuine conversation about the intersection of trauma, rest, and our physical bodies.
Elle is someone who has massively helped my own mental health journey. I participated in her Summer of Rest program last year, which had a profound impact on me both physically and emotionally. Elle describes herself as a “body witch” – she works in somatic trauma healing, as a breath work practitioner and as a rest teacher with a background in yogic lineage who has moved into somatics and the study of how we exist in our bodies.
What Exactly Is Trauma?
One of the most illuminating parts of our conversation was Elle’s explanation of trauma. As she puts it, trauma occurs when “our body-mind experiences something that it can’t digest in the moment, that it is either too much too fast or not enough over too long.”
While our bodies have natural protective mechanisms when we face threats (fight, flight, freeze), trauma happens when these responses get stuck and can’t complete. This is especially relevant when we think about systemic oppression – when you’re a Fat person, a Disabled person, a Black person, a Trans person, or anyone existing within layers of oppression, accessing healthcare can become not just stressful but genuinely traumatic because you cannot escape the threats you’re experiencing.
As Elle explained: “That’s why I am very interested in the overlaps of trauma and oppression, because if you want a bunch of things that you can’t run away from or you can’t fight … we’re talking about the systems that we live in a lot of the time.”
Our Protective Mechanisms
Elle broke down the four main protective responses our bodies use when threatened:
Fight: Moving toward a threat. This might look like physical aggression for some people, or being constantly angry at the state of the world for others.
Flight: Moving away from a threat. This can manifest as literal running away, avoidance, twitchiness, or even fantasies about escaping to live in the woods.
Freeze: A “hypo response” that’s cold, slow, and still. It might feel like certain parts of your body don’t exist, or finding yourself unable to write that email even though you know you need to.
Fawn: The relational protection mechanism where you become hypersocial, people-pleasing, saying what others want to hear with a plastered-on smile. “For those of us raised female,” Elle noted, “it might be a really familiar response to finding safety.”
This framework has helped me understand my own responses better. I’ve always thought I was a “fight now, ask questions later” type of person, but through working with Elle, I realized many of my responses that I assumed were fight-based (like blowing up relationships or creating social media frenzies) were actually flight responses – ways of escaping before I could be rejected.
Beyond Talk Therapy: The Need for Somatic Trauma Healing
As a doctor, I’ve done plenty of therapy, and I value it greatly. But sometimes I find myself sick of talking about my problems. I understand where my issues come from, I recognize my patterns, but that cognitive understanding alone doesn’t always translate to change.
Elle explained why this happens: “You can’t think your way through the thing. That is because you’re not just a brain, you are a brain and a body… The body is multifaceted, multi-layered. You have the physical body, the emotional body, the mental body, the energetic body, the spiritual body, the relational body.”
Therapy is excellent for understanding our thoughts and cognitive patterns, but it’s dealing with just one piece of the whole. At some point, many of us hit a wall where we need to incorporate other approaches.
Learning to Feel Our Feelings
One of my ongoing challenges has been learning what feelings actually feel like in my body. Fear is easiest to identify, but other emotions remain elusive. I shared with Elle how I’m struggling with joy – trying to experience pleasure but wondering “isn’t it supposed to feel bigger than this, more exciting?”
Elle reassured me there’s no “correct” way to feel feelings. We’ve grown up in a world that makes it harder to access these sensations, cut off from our relationship with our own bodies, with other people, and with our environment.
This is where somatic practices come in – gentle movements and breath work that help us reconnect with our embodied experience. These practices aren’t about performing or achieving; they’re about noticing “I am a body” and paying attention to the life moving through us.
Rest as Resistance
When it comes to health, I’ve been moving away from the “just take this pill” approach in my practice. I know that constantly living under threat interferes with our bodies on a cellular level. But telling someone to “rest more” can feel like empty advice – what does that even mean, and when are they supposed to do it?
Elle offered a beautiful perspective on rest that goes far beyond taking a nap:
“How does it feel possible for you to connect to something bigger than you? That doesn’t have to be God, that can be like, ‘I understand that I live on the Earth, and she is a planet, and I live within an ecosystem.’ Even if it is daffodils and squirrels, that is still an ecosystem.”
She explained that for generations, capitalism and colonialism have disconnected us from wholeness and our relationship with the land. The ways we counteract these forces is by choosing to find something different – turning our attention, energy, and body toward connection.
For Elle, this means taking herself for a daily walk and noticing the seasons changing – “That tree has more leaves budding than it did yesterday” or “Look, the daffodils are coming up.” These small moments of remembering we’re part of a larger living world can ground us in the possibility of rest.
Finding Rest in Everyday Life
I found Elle’s approach freeing because it acknowledges that rest isn’t just about lying down or taking a bath. It can mean many different things. Since moving to the countryside, I’ve found great joy in noticing small changes in nature – like the green shimmer appearing over freshly sown fields on the farmland where I walk daily.
Even if you live in an urban environment, Elle reminds us that nature is everywhere if we look for it – birds in the sky, plants pushing through sidewalk cracks, even the constant pull of gravity on our bodies. These connections can be profoundly restful when we tune into them.
Final Thoughts
Working with Elle has been transformative for me. Her approach to somatic trauma healing has left a lasting imprint, helping me access parts of myself that remained closed off despite years of talk therapy. Whether you’re dealing with specific trauma, chronic stress, or simply feeling disconnected from your body, there’s wisdom to be found in these somatic approaches.
As we discussed in the podcast, connection is an essential part of rest and healing – whether it’s connecting with nature, our own bodies, or finding community with others who understand our experiences. Having a supportive space where we can exist without judgment is itself a powerful form of somatic healing. That’s why I created the weighting room and why I am so grateful for this incredible community.
As Elle puts it, our protective mechanisms contain great wisdom – they got us to where we are today. By approaching them with compassion rather than frustration, we can honor their role while expanding beyond their limitations.
Do you have experience with somatic trauma healing practices? Has talk therapy been enough for your healing journey, or have you found other approaches helpful? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
If you’re intrigued by this approach to healing, I highly recommend checking out Elle’s work. She offers one-on-one sessions on a sliding scale (because financial accessibility matters in healing work), as well as a Patreon called Studio Dreamland with monthly breath work and somatics workshops. You can find all the information on her website. This blog post is based on a conversation between Asher and Elle in Episode 17, Season 5 of the Fat Doctor Podcast. You can listen to the podcast or watch the video on YouTube.