Somatic Therapy
What is Somatic Psychotherapy?
Somatic Psychotherapy refers to the bodily, or felt-sense, component of our emotional experiences. Soma is a Greek word referring to the body, and a sense of wholeness within it, both literal and figurative.
Have you ever been anxious, and felt a tightness or constriction in your chest or gut? That feeling is physical, meaning it’s not in your head, but it is also somewhat elusive - an X-Ray could not pick it up. That is the somatic feeling, and it can serve as a useful entry point to a deeper form of therapy.
Much of our experience of life is sub-cognitive. This is matched by our neurophysiological wiring, where only a small percentage is explicitly devoted to surface level cognitive thinking. Somatic Psychotherapy recognizes this, and works with the deeper structures of our being to help work through trauma, anxiety, depression, and many other challenges we all face.
The Body Keeps The Score
Bessel Van Der Kolk’s now famous book, The Body Keeps The Score, devotes a significant portion of its chapters to various somatic based psychotherapies. Many clients have the frustrating experience of “I understand what the problem is. For some reason, I’m still doing the negative behavior and I still feel the negative emotion.” This very common experience is because just cognitively understanding something does not always unburden us from the deeper levels of that issue. This is where Somatic Psychotherapy comes in, helping you access deeper levels of yourself where the trauma, anxiety, or other challenges have their roots.
How Does Somatic Psychotherapy Work?
As with any therapeutic modality, not everyone is appropriate for Somatic Therapy. Even though everyone has a somatic side to their feelings, that does not mean it is the optimal approach for everyone. You and your therapist work together to understand what it is, and if you think it may be useful for you.
Key identifiers for using Somatic therapeutic techniques may be:
strong physical sensations correlated to emotions, memories, or experiences
feeling out of control
highly charged triggers
cognitive understanding that doesn’t lead to behavioral or experiential change
Nervous system dysregulation
Gut dysregulation
What does a Somatic Therapy Session Look Like?
In many ways, a somatic therapy session may look like a regular talk therapy session, except instead of focusing on the meaning of thoughts, you will be more focused on the experience of them. This may include visualization, memory processing or rescripting, and working with feelings that don’t necessarily have rational content associated with them.
Instead of “what do you feel?” your therapist may ask “where in your body do you feel that?”
Somatic Therapy assumes we all have a natural inclination towards wholeness and healing. Your therapist acts as the “container,” providing the conditions and gentle guidance for your system to naturally process as it needs to.
Is The Past Present?
A term we often use is borrowed from Dr. Peter Levine’s modality, Somatic Experiencing. He discusses "unexperienced experiences” where, in the past, your nervous system activated to deal with a threat, but for various reasons was unable to do so.
A good example of this is abuse as a child. The child's nervous system activates a fight/flight response, but very often cannot use it because the abuser is much larger and stronger. Just because the fight/flight response can’t be used does not mean it goes away. Rather, it becomes stuck, or latent, in the nervous system.
The deeper structures of our brain do not recognize chronology. Even if as an adult, you know the abuse happened in the past, if it was never processed properly, a part of your system does not recognize that, and behaves as if that threat is still present. In other words, the past is present. Somatic Psychotherapy can help you process those “unexperienced experiences,” and help put the past in the past.
Why Somatic Psychotherapy?
We work with Somatic Psychotherapies because we have seen their effectiveness, especially at healing trauma and deeper nervous system dysregulations. While all therapeutic modalities serve a purpose, we have often seen clients who have tried other therapies, and while they may have been helpful in certain ways, the deeper triggers and dysregulations still persist. We’ve found that somatic work can help you cross the finish line to your healing goals.
We’re informed by Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi, Somatic IFS, as well as a robust understanding of the deeper neurophysiological structures through our work with neurofeedback and neurostimulation.
Somatic Psychotherapies and their basic framework also provide very useful models when doing EMDR and Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy.
Take The Next Step in Healing with Somatic Psychotherapy
If you are interested in learning more about Somatic Psychotherapy and how it fits into your healing process, please schedule a free 15 minute consultation call using the button below. A skilled and knowledgeable clinician will work with you to make the appropriate decision about your next steps.