Read your state
Learn how autonomic state, interoception, and felt safety influence attention, sensation, decision-making, and performance.
The first book devoted to freediving, the nervous system, and mental health
What happens beneath the surface was never only about breath.
Behind the Mask brings nervous system science, trauma-informed practice, and the lived physiology of freediving into one substantial guide—for divers who want to understand not only how they perform, but how they experience themselves underwater.
2025Published by Somanautica
2 lbA genuinely substantial manual
ISBN979-8-9995920-2-6
A Freediver’s Guide to Nervous System Regulation, Recovery & Resilience
Freedivers are taught to train the breath, manage carbon dioxide, refine technique, and pursue depth. Yet the nervous system determines whether those skills remain available when pressure—physical or psychological—changes the state of the diver.
This is the missing conversation.
Inside the book
A field guide to the body beneath the dive.
The book makes complex physiology usable without flattening the human experience into “just relax.” Because, frankly, freedivers deserve more than two words and a shrug.
Understand the dive response
Explore the mammalian dive response as more than a collection of reflexes—as an embodied doorway into regulation and recovery.
Train capacity
Work with discomfort, contractions, stress, and recovery in ways that support agency rather than rewarding disconnection.
Build a safer dive culture
Recognize co-regulation, language, choice, and psychological safety as practical parts of competent instruction and buddying.
From the back cover
“In the water, stripped of words and roles, I found a different kind of teacher. The ocean didn’t ask me to explain or perform; it asked me to listen.”
Through lived experience, research, and the voices of more than one hundred divers, Behind the Mask reframes freediving as a practice of regulation, restoration, and return.
Written for the whole dive system
For freedivers, instructors, and trauma-informed practitioners.
- FreediversUnderstand why a skill can feel available one day and unreachable the next.
- InstructorsSee the state beneath the behavior—and coach without shame, pressure, or lazy labels.
- Helping professionalsExplore how immersion, apnea, interoception, and embodied mastery may support recovery.
In the wider conversation
The work is already traveling.
Google Books
“The first of its kind to explore the intersection of trauma recovery and the mammalian dive reflex.”View the listing → Molchanovs
From Trauma to Transformation Through Freediving
A feature on Elaine’s story, research, and mission to support trauma recovery through freediving.
Read the feature → AIDA BelgiumThe Science of Calm
AIDA Belgium presented Elaine and Behind the Mask as part of its Dive Expo workshop programming.
See the feature → Goodreads★★★★★
5.0 average reader ratingView on Goodreads →
About the author
Elaine Hicks, LCSW, CSAC
Elaine Hicks is a licensed clinical social worker, nervous system educator, university-level educator, researcher, and freedive instructor based on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. Known as The Underwater Therapist, she developed the Hicks DIVE Method and a trauma-informed approach to freediving that connects autonomic science, interoception, co-regulation, and the lived experience of breath-hold diving.
Elaine is not a world-record athlete—and that is part of the point. Behind the Mask examines freediving from the perspective of the human nervous system, where depth is information, performance is state-dependent, and the body always gets a vote.
Choose your edition
Take the work below the surface.
Read it, write in it, argue with it, bring it to the water. The goal is not passive agreement—it is deeper understanding and more available choice.