Your partner reaches for you, and your whole body braces.
Your breath stops. Your stomach knots. You want to be close, and some part of you is getting ready for a fight.
Afterward come the stories: “I'm sabotaging myself. I'm too damaged for this. Why can't I just relax?”
Somatic trauma therapist Barbara Collier has a different name for it: an adaptive response. Your nervous system learned long ago that closeness could cost you something, and it's still protecting you from the there and then while you're trying to live in the here and now.
In this episode, Dr. Saida and Aaron Michael sit down with Barbara, a former intensive care nurse who has spent two decades as a somatic trauma therapist, to explore what happens in your body when triggers hijack intimacy, and how you find your way back.
You'll discover:
• Why arousal can feel like alarm, when anxiety and excitement run on the same charge
• Why calling it a "pattern" keeps you stuck in shame, and why curiosity changes everything
• What living with one foot on the gas and one on the brake does to your health over years
• Why trauma that happened before you had language rarely shifts through talk alone
• The first small step back toward pleasure when you feel numb, tense, or in pain
Then it gets personal in the members-only section.
Barbara shares how, decades into her career and freshly divorced, she had decided she didn't care if she ever had sex again, and what she found when she questioned that. You'll hear the difference between your body's yes and the "social yes" you were trained to give, the early warning signs your body sends before an argument starts, and what to do when your partner gets triggered and every instinct says run or fix it.
And in the members-only guest insert, Barbara guides a short practice you can take anywhere. Dr. Saida said afterward the world felt "friendlier and less pokey." Then Barbara shows how the same attention can reach the places where pain lives, including the pelvis and old scar tissue.
👉 GET THE FULL EPISODE + BARBARA'S GUIDED PRACTICE: https://learning.embodiedloveuniversity.com/podcasts
LEARN MORE ABOUT BARBARA COLLIER → https://barbaracollier.com
