Healing Using Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy is a gentle, yet powerful modern therapy technique that has helped my clients to heal decades-old pain and to reach unexpected levels of joy, peace and confidence in their lives. Somatic therapy works to reveal and resolve the trauma and childhood wounding that underlies anxiety, depression, PTSD/CPTSD, relationship difficulties and other mental health issues. I have clients who have been in therapy for many years yet experienced breakthroughs within the first few sessions using this different approach.
In somatic therapy, we still talk like with other forms of therapy but the focus is more on the meaning held in your body rather than in your logical brain. We use mindfulness to discover the subconscious beliefs, pains and traumas that are shaping your everyday experience and intuitively experiment with images, words and movements to access positive resources and facilitate healing.
You’ll naturally arrive at places of positive change in session and we’ll work to carefully integrate that change within your body, mind and emotions so it feels complete, authentic and sticks with you out in the real world. We’ll also develop practical, effective tools and resources to use when things get hard in your life.
If you want to finally heal from the past using a safe, effective technique, please reach out for a free 25-minute consultation.
Four Steps to Healing Using Somatic Therapy
Preparation: Before we go in to heal pain, we first want to feel confident in our ability to deal with whatever we may encounter. We'll build a toolkit of what helps you feel calm, strong and connected. That way facing the unhealed pain feels a lot less scary.
Discovery: Once we're feeling prepared, we gently start exploring places of difficulty in your present or past, paying mindful attention to what is happening in the body at that moment. This way we can learn from the body what unhelpful core beliefs it is holding and what painful, unhealed experiences are still lingering.
Healing: Now that we've discovered something, sometimes the pain or unhelpful belief immediately resolves and other times we experiment with different words, postures and actions to see what helps bring in healing. We go with whatever works and keep experimenting until we find it, trusting your mind and body’s innate drive to seek wholeness.
Integration: Once we find healing and new perspectives, we work to ensure it is integrated within body the mind and body so the change is deeply rooted and lasts. This means we don't just stop with the new way of looking at yourself or the world, we also deepen into the emotions, sensations, images, postures and movements that go with it. Most importantly, we come up with ways of bringing those changes with you into your everyday life.
If this sounds interesting to you, I’d love to discuss how we can apply this to your situation and help you heal!
“The body always leads us home… if we can simply learn to trust sensation and stay with it long enough for it to reveal appropriate action, movement, insight, or feeling.”
Pat Ogden, founder of The Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute
How Can Somatic Therapy Help Me?
*Thought-focused therapy refers to any style of therapy that focuses on changing thoughts as the primary means to promote psychological change. CBT is the most prominent example.
In therapy there are three main underlying tasks, each of which helps a person get to their overall treatment goals.
Discover and resolve limiting beliefs - this relates to thoughts that aren’t accurate and limit you from being your best self.
Discover and resolve core relational issues - this relates to your basic felt sense of being able to trust people and to feel safe getting close. This felt sense is also known as attachment style and it plays a pivotal role in the enjoyment and satisfaction you get from relationships.
Discover and resolve unprocessed trauma - this relates to instances where you sensed your life was in danger and became overwhelmed/dissociated. Unresolved trauma can underly many psychological as well as medical conditions and predisposes one to intense emotional and bodily reactions during everyday life.
Limiting Beliefs
Somatic therapy and thought-focused therapy are both able to discover and resolve limiting beliefs because they both include tools to discover and analyze patterns of thought. Thoughts like “It’s not OK to say how I really feel” can be addressed and replaced with more positive and accurate beliefs.
However, many of these core beliefs come with corresponding patterns of posture and tension in the body - for example, the chronic tension in the chest and stomach of somebody who feels like they have to keep part of themselves hidden for fear of hurting another or being hurt.
Somatic therapy focuses on uncovering and changing these body patterns so that your body supports and reinforces the new core beliefs. In the example above, we may experience with ways of establishing a sense of boundary between self and other so that it feels more safe to be who we are.
Thought-focused therapy alone doesn’t do that and is the reason many people get stuck knowing they should be thinking one way but still feeling like the opposite is true.
Core Relational Issues
Core relational patterns, also called attachment styles, govern how we act, think and feel within intimate bonds at a subconscious level. These patterns are rooted in the emotional centers of our brain and aren’t fully accessibly to the reasoning/language parts of our brain. This lack of accessibility is part of the reason why it’s so hard to convey to others why you act/feel/think a certain way within the relationship.
So many of the building blocks that form our relational style can’t be discovered through reflective thinking and are only accessible through becoming more aware of what is held in the body. Somatic therapy works directly with postures, emotions, and sensations to elicit images/early memories and discover the experiences/patterns that shaped your particular attachment style.
Once we discover these foundational experiences, we work directly with the memory/pattern to provide your inner child with the attuned, supportive parent they needed but didn’t get at the time. Providing this missing experience in the here-and-now can lead to dramatic healing and change.
Unresolved Trauma
Talk-focused therapy hits big barriers when attempting to resolve trauma. Simple stated, trauma is something that happened to our bodies and so it must be resolved using our bodies.
More specifically, during a traumatic event, the prefrontal cortex and key memory-making areas in other parts of the brain become overwhelmed and go offline. So instead of the memories being stored like usual, the core trauma gets stored in the survival parts of the brain. These primitive parts of the brain do not know the difference between the past and present and so even though you have survived, they are stuck reliving the trauma every time something triggers them.
Somatic-based therapy provides a way to face and resolve the trauma memories without being overwhelmed or retraumatized. Resolution often comes in the form of an “act of triumph” - discovering and completing the self-protective action that wanted to happen during the trauma but didn’t. For example, fighting off the attacker or running away from the situation. While it may not make sense logically, letting the body slowly/mindfully go through the movements associated with this defensive action helps it finally realize the danger is passed. Once safety is re-established, memories are reconsolidated in the proper place and the trauma is resolved.
To read more about my somatic approach to resolving trauma - visit my Therapy for PTSD page.