...And How Somatic Therapy Can Bring Lasting Change
Do you ever feel like you're talking in circles with only temporary or little resolve? Uncover how somatic practices can facilitate transformation from constriction and stuckness to expansion and healing.
Many folks discover somatic therapy after having years, if not decades, of talk therapy under their belt. They share with me that they have told their trauma narrative of painful events over and over, yet find themselves still stuck with little movement forward.
Signs of being stuck in your healing process
Continuous memories, reminders, flashbacks from that past that intrude on daily life
Feeling numb, detached, disconnected from painful emotions, yourself, others
Retelling past events without lasting satisfaction or embodied relief
Pattern of responding to situations or people in ways that result in you feeling embarrassed, ashamed, or confused later - maybe realizing that you had a disproportionate response to a trigger
Constantly feeling on edge, guarded, hypervigilant, as if anticipating dangers
Limiting beliefs about yourself, others, or the world that seem rooted in your past or younger parts
If any of these signs sound familiar, you are not alone, and I am grateful you are here now.
Working somatically involves building the capacity to mindfully look within and feel, thus bypassing the thinking brain and accessing the deeper regions of the brain where trauma is stored. By processing mind + body, you will benefit from long-term change and growth.
How Somatic Therapy Reduces Trauma Symptoms and Cultivates Deep Healing
Body Awareness
Paying attention to the body's communications can strengthen self-awareness, build agency to respond compassionately to your needs, and organically heal. Increased body awareness can facilitate growing capacity to feel and process painful emotions and sensations, while also expanding your window of tolerance. Tuning towards your inner world takes practice, especially if disconnecting was a way to cope with immense fear, pain, shame, or other distressing experiences.
Access the root of pain or trauma to accelerate healing
Somatic therapy, such as sensorimotor psychotherapy, incorporates mind + body (rather than only mind) processing, which bypasses cognition/thoughts to reach deeper regions of the brain that store trauma memories and sensorimotor patterns. This allows retrieval and processing of implicit memories, which are necessary for successful release, integration, and embodied healing of trauma. Whereas talk therapy accesses thoughts and explicit memory, somatic therapy also reaches implicit material to move and transform stored trauma energy.
Since it is common to dissociate (e.g. memory gaps/amnesia, foggy memory, disconnect from reality, numbing) as a survival response when overwhelmed by a traumatizing event or painful emotions, somatic therapy works because it does not require directly remembering the trauma.
By working with present moment sensations, you do not need to recount painful details of the past. You can still process and heal from early childhood trauma or repressed memories.
Being More Present
With mindful awareness and attunement to the body comes a natural tendency to be more alive in the present moment. This allows you the opportunity to respond to what is happening in the here-and-now, rather than the past or future, and to experience a wider range of experiences and emotional depth.
Release of Stuck Energy or Emotions
A trained somatic therapist can help you move stored trauma energy and its related
emotions and sensations through and out of the body so that you can truly put the past behind.
Releasing trauma through the body goes beyond coping, and towards freedom and liberation.
Unresolved trauma can lead to repeat feelings, sensations, movements, and impulses stuck on loop. Discharging this energy allows for a therapeutic release and relief that is lasting and transformative.
Empowerment and Agency
With heightened awareness of the body and its communications, needs, and protective nature, you can reclaim your power to respond to things in a way that aligns with all parts of you. With awareness, comes agency to choose how to best respond, while staying compassionate to any original survival instincts that no longer serve you.
Regulation and Balance of the Nervous System
Somatic therapy helps regulate the autonomic nervous system (ANS) by working directly with the body's survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, submit, attach). This helps the brain and body complete an action that was thwarted due to surviving, but still wants/needs to be completed.
When observing your internal state, the brain's prefrontal cortex (in charge of executive functioning) increases in activity, while deeper regions of the brain (in charge of survival responses) reduce in activity - thus promoting a state of calm and safety. By tuning into nervous system states, you can learn to apply critical tools to balance the ANS and ultimately feel more balanced physically and emotionally.
Integration of Trauma
Somatic processing of emotions and trauma can support healing and integration of painful, oftentimes exiled, memories and parts of self.
This can lead to an embodied sense of wholeness and less inner fragmentation. This deep process can accelerate healing so that you are not defined by past traumas or stuck living in the past.
It is possible for the internal chaos to quiet and move towards harmony.
Long-Term Change
By exploring current impacts of past events through somatic therapy, long-term change can happen. In addition to improved emotional regulation, healthier relationships, more internal peace, greater fulfillment, you can achieve an felt sense of wholeness and truly return to your authentic nature.
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Return Home to Yourself
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When we return home to the body, we return to our true nature - our authentic self and spirit. I believe that healing from trauma and past wounds is as much of an emotional, mental, physiological (nervous system) journey as it is a spiritual one.
Trauma undoubtedly demands instinctual protective layers, but it does not mean you need to be forever traumatized. If you are ready to return home and need help addressing and processing pain from your past, it's never too late to try somatic therapy. Contact me to set up a free phone consultation, or ask me for a list of referrals to other somatic therapists I know and trust.
I wish you courage, love, kindness, and liberation in your healing.
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