Somatic Therapy for Trauma and Anxiety
Sometimes talking just isn’t enough.
Somatic therapy, an experiential approach to engaging the body in therapy, can help.
Do you ever feel like you could crawl out of your skin?
Do you worry that your heart might beat its way out of your chest?
Does your stomach clench when you think of something unpleasant?
Does your chest tighten or do your lungs sometimes refuse to allow you to get a full breath?
The good news is that if you answered yes to any of these questions, you have excellent awareness of your body, and we have somewhere from which to start working with somatic therapy. If you aren’t sure or are worried that you might be disconnected from your body or its signals, that’s ok, too! Somatic therapy can help you to reacquaint and re-engage with your body.
What is somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy, therapy that is based on using your body as a resource to draw upon and is based in the Greek word for body, “soma.”
Commonly left out of traditional “talk therapy” training programs, somatic therapy is an excellent and effective therapy for working through trauma and chronic stress and anxiety, among other things. Somatic therapy promotes a relationship between the mind, body, spirit, and the brain to create more “system integration” across the whole person.
Somatic therapy is based on the belief that the body holds trauma within it and that often these traumas can be accessed through one’s “felt sense” which is based in the body and its sensations. Because of trauma, many of us have overactive nervous systems which need retraining - something that somatic therapy can help with.
Somatic therapy seeks to move a person from operating from their “survival brain” to their “rational brain.” Because the human brain is wired for survival, it sometimes misinterprets minor threats (an annoying email from a colleague) as a major one (a bear attacking you in the woods.) This can make us feel discomfort within our bodies and can cause an emotional reaction that is not equivalent to the actual unpleasant but very survivable threat. Somatic therapy will help you train your body and brain to recognize the difference between real and perceived threats and to manage the body’s response accordingly.
What does somatic therapy do?
Contrary to traditional talk therapy, somatic therapy does NOT focus on verbalizing trauma but instead a somatic practitioner or somatic therapist will encourage you to feel what happens within your body when you think about talking about an experience. By familiarizing you with your felt sense of something, somatic therapy can then empower you to appropriate apply the “gas” or “brakes” to your nervous system response, often through breathing techniques, body “awakening” strategies, and other physical interventions to orient you to your body’s being and its signals so that YOU can learn how to calm or activate yourself, as needed, rather than feeling overwhelmed or shut down by bodily sensations.
If you’ve engaged in typical talk therapy before and find yourself still stuck or overwhelmed by your body’s physical responses, either related to trauma or to anxiety, somatic therapy can offer healing where words haven’t helped.
How can somatic therapy help me?
Somatic therapy assumes that the body is self-healing and that our bodies desire safety rather than danger, and yet many of us become trapped in “trauma physiology” that can hold us captive to overwhelming physical and emotional sensations that are unpleasant or disruptive to our daily lives; our brain cannot tell the difference between the present moment and previous experiences. When we get “stuck” in trauma physiology, our brain reacts as if we are re-experiencing a traumatic event or memory. Somatic therapy can help us get “unstuck” by grounding us in our bodies and either mobilizing or immobiling us as we need and desire it rather than defaulting to a trauma response.
Somatic therapy can teach you how to recognize and build resources for familiarizing yourself with a “felt sense” of safety in your body. We all desire to feel safe, comfortable, and “at home” in our bodies - somatic therapy can help you to learn to do this.