Something that I’ve been nerding out on and that has been immensely helpful in my personal healing journey and in my work with my clients has been somatic therapy. I think it’s getting more airtime due to TikTok and celebrities and people being more therapy-savvy in general. If you’ve been curious about it too, this blogs for you.
What is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy is a way of doing therapy that pays extra attention to your body and its needs and its experiences. Historically, therapy has been very focused on the mind and our thoughts and our stories. This isn’t wrong but it misses a big piece of the puzzle of our mental health and wellbeing.
Anxiety, depression, ptsd, eating disorders, addictions, and stress involve and impact the body. A lot of our behaviors aren’t driven by how we think but also how we feel and how we want to feel. If we can understand that connection, we can find other ways to help us feel better and also learn how to tolerate our feelings and not be so desperate and reactive with our discomforts.
What Makes Somatic Therapy Different?
Somatic therapy can feel a little different in sessions than traditional talk therapy. It keeps closer to the present moment than your past or future, and stays closer to your body than your head, and therefore feels a little slower as it can take time to learn to connect to your moment and to your body since our culture doesn’t generally teach us or reinforce us for doing all that.
One of the goals of somatic work is to become an ally with your body instead of ignoring or controlling it. In somatic therapy we try to respect the body and its experience and its needs. Often our culture supports us dominating our body through diet and exercise and productivity. Or we subdue it with food or alcohol or mindlessly scrolling so we don’t need to pay attention to it when it’s in pain or inconvenient. With somatics we want to build a relationship with the body that is symbiotic and nurturing and helpful and kind. When we work with the body we stop fighting it and learn to work with it.
Another aspect of somatic therapy is that it aims to make you and your body the expert, not society or some TikTok clown or your family or even me. You learn to listen to and work with your own unique body and its needs and boundaries and preferences. This has the added bonus of helping reconnecting us to our intuition and rebuilding trust in ourselves and our bodies (which is often lost in trauma). I like psychedelics and ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP) for building the connection and trust in our own inner wisdom as well, and actually the blend of somatics and psychedelics are a very potent combo for treating chronic stress, PTSD and CPTSD. But that’s a whole different rabbit hole you can feel free to reach out and set up a time to talk to me about.
Who Can Benefit from Somatic Therapy?
Because somatic therapy is a great tool to help regulate emotions, build capacity for life, and cultivate a relationship with the body, the short answer is: anyone who’s experienced stress and trauma…which is everyone! Especially those who have had stress and trauma and have had a hard time moving past those events or who have struggled with day to day living and current life as a result of stressors in the past.
When we have stress and trauma and aren’t connected to our bodies, we habituate to and dissociate from pain and disgust and discomfort. But then we don’t know our boundaries and preferences. We aren’t aware of how alcohol or that relationship or our own cruel words impact us. We also don’t know how good that rest and sunshine and a big laugh can feel either. And so we don’t change anything. But when we can feel how our environment or our thoughts or habits or relationships impact us, we can better navigate how to take care of ourselves.
Somatic Therapy for PTSD and CPTSD
Trauma induces a stress response of fight, flight freeze, or fawn(people pleasing). That’s not inherently a bad thing, those responses help keep us safe. But ptsd symptoms emerge when we’re not able to perform those responses (your body wants to run but it’s trapped and the energy gets stuck in your body and you feel antsy all the time) and/or we get stuck in the responses (I needed to fight to protect myself but now I’m still braced for a fight even though I’m in a safe environment). When this happens our bodies feel chronically unsafe and dysregulated.
If we can’t find safety we are chronically stressed and might develop injury or get sick or develop go distress, migraines, or auto-immune symptoms. If we can’t find safety we can shut down and avoid and feel numb and that looks like depression. Or feel keyed up and tense and get panic attacks. Or we try to avoid the feelings in our body with food or drugs or sex or shopping or scrolling mindlessly online or whatever else.
With reconnecting to the body, the goal is to be able to get back to the present moment and back to a felt sense of safety after stress. The goal is not to feel good all the time. It’s to have flexibility to hold joy and safety and be able to be with yourself and nurture your body in sadness and fear and anger and shame and also take action when stressful events happen.
Easy Somatic Exercise to Try
Take a breath and notice your surroundings. Notice where you are and who’s around. Maybe notice the temperature or brightness of the room. Look and see if you can find something in the room that you like. What happens as you look at it? Maybe something softens or expands or feels warm or tingly. See if you can find the place in your body that responds and put your focus there. As you focus, it might change and get bigger or smaller or it might move or might disappear. Just notice. And…you did it. You did some (obviously not all) somatic therapy!