Body as a Narrative: Benefits of Somatic Psychotherapy
Your Body is a Walking Narrative
It contains information about layers of trauma and stress that may be buried deep within your muscles and tissue.
These messages don’t have to feel mysterious; there’s a way to tap into them and use the information in your daily life. ‘Soma’ means ‘body’ in ancient Greek, and ‘somatic therapy’ refers to body-centered therapy. Somatic therapy is the practice of reading your body and decoding what your sensations are telling you. When you deeply understand the messages your body is sending, you tap into an inherent and intuitive healing experience.
Learning how to listen to, respect, and consciously inhabit your body is how we heal trauma. Trauma is stored deep in your body and requires intentional practices to release it. To protect yourself, you may have developed a habit of rationalizing, intellectualizing, and living in your head (this is a very normal trauma response). If you’ve ever repeated the phrase ‘everything happens for a reason’ while holding back tears, you’ve very likely been there.
Who Should Try Somatic Therapy?
Anyone and everyone can benefit from somatic healing. There’s no exception to that. Why? Because even if you’ve never experienced a traumatic event, we live in a culture that separates body and mind. We favor the head, the thoughts, and the mind. That’s not a joyful, embodied, present way to live our lives.
Despite what our culture has trained us to believe, at the end of the day, we are animals with nervous systems responding to stress. We can’t think our way out of it! When trauma happens, it happens to our nervous system. We have ancient survival reflexes that go in a specific order—fight, flight, freeze, and finally, collapse—that kick in to protect us from harm. If you experienced a trauma response earlier in your life, your nervous system has held onto that response. If you repeatedly experienced traumatic events (like growing up in a volatile environment or being bullied), this stress compounds upon itself.
Common Trauma Responses
Depression
Anxiety
Substance abuse
Autoimmune conditions
Cancer
Diabetes
Acne
Eczema
Your body needs to get the stress out somehow, and it usually manifests itself as a condition in your mind or body. That becomes a learned pathway, and your body needs a conscious redirection to start processing in a new way.
The Effect of Trauma on the Body
Holding trauma in your nervous system leads to a weakened immune system. This makes it harder to take care of ourselves, harder to prevent pain and illness and leads us to become vulnerable to more dangerous situations (for instance, a person who turned to bulimia after being bullied or a person who started drinking to handle their daily stress levels.) This means we are less resilient to more trauma.
Trauma happens from the bottom up and therefore must be healed from the bottom up, rather than the top down. Have you ever tried talk therapy or prescription medication, but found that it isn’t working? This might be because you are turning to meaning-making to heal the trauma in your mind, and therefore staying in the mind while neglecting the trauma that’s actually stored in your body.
While meaning-making is important for recovery, it has to happen in addition to treating the trauma in your body and usually comes after you have integrated trauma into your nervous system. You can make meaning all day long, but if you don’t go to the body, the trauma lingers. It’s akin to giving your house a fresh coat of paint instead of replacing the rotting wood: it will keep water out, but only for a bit. Your body is giving you clues: your stomach drops when you see you have a new email notification, and your heart races when you're getting ready in the morning. Body-centered therapy helps you read these clues, trust your intuition, practice self-soothing/regulation, and find lasting relief!
The Role of Mindfulness in Somatic Therapy
When I work with clients at my practice in Denver, we start with developing practices of mindfulness. I give you resources and exercises to ground your body and be mindful of sensations that you can use outside of our therapy sessions. I teach somatic exercises based on a body-centered, mindfulness-based modality called The Hakomi Method. (If you're about to click away because you’ve tried mindfulness unsuccessfully, hang in there with me for a bit.)
Mindfulness is commonly associated with meditation or being happy regardless of circumstance. This can feel easy for some people, and totally inaccessible for others (especially those with any kind of trauma history). It’s hard to be mindful and present when your body is still hanging onto the impact of trauma within the nervous system. You might even have a practice of actively escaping the present! The Hakomi Method is different; it’s very much about dropping into the body and discovering what is happening with curiosity and non-judgment. It’s a safe space to explore trauma, and you don’t have to empty your mind or conjure up a false sense of happiness to do it. A note: for some, meditation can actually induce a trauma response. If you have a trauma history, it's important to work with a professional as you begin to explore meditation.
Somatic therapy opens up a new pathway to express your emotions by living more mindfully. The idea of living in the present gets thrown around a lot, and it can be falsely equated with being calm all the time or being constantly happy. Here’s a reframe: mindfulness is a ticket out of being totally blindsided by strong emotions, or feeling like our mind is a chaotic place.
Living in the moment means learning to read the signals that your body sends you throughout your day. You use those signals to understand the emotions that normally would blindside you later, and you can use tools in the present moment to regulate and soothe yourself. No weird flash of rage when you can’t get the can of black beans opened three hours later; you dealt with those emotions already. And, this doesn’t have to be an exhausting, tiring process! Somatic therapy can be fun. I have a long background in dance, and I am fascinated with the ways that we can use movements to process trauma.
What is Somatic Therapy Like?
Here’s what a somatic therapy session can look like at my practice in Denver:
Awareness
We start our sessions with a body scan. You’ll notice something about your body; maybe your heart is contracting and squeezing, maybe you feel some heat; maybe you feel a rise of emotion.
Interpretation
Together, we explore the sensations you notice by seeing if images, narratives, or beliefs come up. If you understand the images, narratives, or beliefs that are tied to your body, you’re using your body as a compass and guide to understanding how you’re feeling in the moment.
Reprocessing
From there, we use what your body is telling you along with a reprocessing technique to help that trauma release itself from your nervous system.
The Hakomi Method gives you tools that are valuable for your day-to-day life. You’ll start to recognize patterns of sensation and have tools to soothe yourself when those sensations come up outside of therapy. The real magic happens when you pair somatic bodywork with reprocessing treatments like EMDR. The body and mind can work in tandem and use their innate healing capabilities to make meaning in the mind while releasing the trauma from the nervous system.
Pairing EMDR and Somatic Therapy for Healing
The body is made to heal trauma! Our nervous system can help us process bodily trauma, but only if we intentionally shift into this healing mode. One of the tools I use to help release trauma from your muscles and tissue is called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR. Most treatments use EMDR as a standalone method, but I find that there is real healing power in combining EMDR and somatic therapy. EMDR helps you reprocess a memory, and somatic therapy helps you explore the sensations in your body. Combining these two allows you to access the innate healing potential of both your mind and body.
Have you ever seen someone deep in REM sleep? Beneath closed eyelids, you may notice that their eyes are flicking back and forth beneath the eyelids. It looks creepy, but something amazing is happening: the brain is reprocessing the events from the day before. It’s telling you that the sandwich you ate was not significant, but the meeting you attended was. Try it out! Can you remember your last conversation with your boss? Now, how about what you ate for dinner two weeks ago on a Tuesday? (By the way, if you suffer from an eating disorder and can remember what you ate, let’s chat!)
EMDR is a bilateral stimulation technique, and it’s a way of doing the work that happens during round sleep together. First, we discuss what you want to explore during your EMDR session. Then, the tappers come out. Sounds scary, but they rock. Tappers are EMDR tools that vibrate in your hands. They are made to stimulate your parasympathetic restoration cycle and rebalance the nervous system.
With my support, we take a look at traumatic experiences within a safe container. We go back, explore our traumatic experiences, and let our brains reprocess them the way we would as if we were sleeping. It goes against the very chaotic, fast-moving nature of trauma; we organize and refile some of these chaotic memories so they make sense again in our nervous system, creating a linear narrative in our memory and nervous system.
How Your Life Can Be Impacted by Somatic Therapy
Let’s say you make a minor blunder in traffic and someone gives you the ole’ angry honk (or worse, the bird!) You turn scarlet, and heat starts rising into your chest and face. Your body is telling you something important. Without a body-centered therapist, this experience is just a bummer. When you work with a body-centered therapist, that moment is a gold nugget!
We can explore that moment—why did your body react with a sensation that you associate with shame? What narrative are you attaching to a simple mistake? Are you unconsciously berating yourself for an imperfect moment? It may even be conjuring up embodied trauma from other times in your life when you’ve felt shame. Suddenly, the fact that you didn’t notice the light turned green is linked to key moments of shame in your life.
And that, we can work with! When we view our body’s responses as a gift of insight, we have a tremendous tool for healing. You can’t go back to when you were a child and were made to feel ashamed, but you can recognize the bodily sensations of shame and be prepared with affirmation and tools to heal what you feel when it arises. This can lead to deeper healing than just focusing on your thoughts. I love seeing the healing that my clients have experienced through somatic therapy.
Learn More About Somatic Therapy:
At Sona Collective, we love helping our clients from Denver and throughout Colorado access new levels of healing. Trauma is stored in the body, but it doesn’t have to stay there. Learn more about our somatic therapy offerings or schedule a complimentary consultation.