Beginning your healing journey with somatic therapy can bring a mix of excitement and nervousness while you navigate taking steps towards self-discovery. It’s important to recognize and acknowledge that you are taking positive steps towards healing and understanding what to expect can help you to feel more prepared and at ease. We have developed this useful guide to help you prepare and embark on your journey.
Somatic (meaning the body) Therapy involves using the mind-body connection in treatment to help to address both psychological and physical symptoms of many mental health concerns including depression, anxiety, trauma and grief. The goal of somatic therapy is to help increase awareness of sensations within your body and work through distressing or painful sensations by using your own internal resources. Somatic Therapy can assist with the regulation of your nervous system and what you may have heard as the “fight, flight, and freeze” response. When you come into contact with a threat, your body can engage in a “freeze” response long after the threat is gone. Our bodies can hold emotional memory and sensations related to a threat. With the freeze response, your body can prevent you from completely processing and recovering from a distressing experience.
Your somatic therapist will provide a safe, comfortable, and collaborative environment, establishing trust while learning about your history and goals. You will learn to notice body sensations when you are feeling triggered or stressed and you will also be able to practice different somatic techniques to help you release deeper pain, emotions, and physical sensations.
For example, when you are stressed, you may notice tightness in your chest, or your therapist may help you explore observations of how your body is reacting to a stressor. When you are upset, maybe there is a heaviness in your stomach or other sensations you discover in therapy, that you were not aware of. Your therapist will help you connect to how your body responds to different stressors and triggers and help you build skills that will down-regulate your fight and flight response and bring a sense of calm. This may include learning new skills such as meditation, deep breathing and relaxation techniques.
When we experience a stressor, our nervous system speeds up and interrupts our ability to process what is happening within our body. Your therapist will help you slow down your experiencing and connect with your body so that you can release negative emotions and sensations that are keeping you from finding peace. When you experience distress or a trigger, it is often experienced too fast, too intensely and feels as though it is “too much”. Your nervous system can become overwhelmed. When this happens, your therapist will help you draw from the skills learned in therapy to bring you back to the present moment.
Grounding Exercises can help you connect your senses to your environment and create distance from distressful memories and events by connecting you to the present moment.
Resourcing and Visualization can help you connect to a calm, peaceful and safe place in your mind. When experiencing distress, drawing on your calm safe space in your mind can help to alleviate your distress.
Embracing Yourself a hug can make you feel contained and safe. Try bringing your right hand near your heart and your left hand on your right shoulder.
Body Scanning can help you to explore where you are holding distress and tension in your body and your therapist can teach you how to use different strategies to release tension and continue scanning for other areas of tension until you are feeling more calm.
Remember that learning new skills is like building muscle. The more we exercise and practice new skills, the stronger and more powerful they become in decreasing our distress.
There are many benefits of Somatic Therapy that can contribute to an overall improvement in wellbeing:
It’s important to remember that your Somatic Therapist will take the time it takes and help you slow down and prioritize your healing over our society’s tendency to rush (while bypassing our pain) in order be productive. Your Somatic Therapist will meet you with compassion, empathy, and understanding.
The physiological response to anxiety and trauma may show up in our bodies as difficulty breathing, tightened muscles and tension, which is part of the sympathetic nervous system that is activated in the fight, or flight response. Somatic Therapy helps locate where our body stores our trauma and anxiety in order to release these sensations and replace negative events with new positive sensations and experiences. Somatic therapy helps to draw on the parasympathetic nervous system response, which is the restorative and restful part of our nervous system.
Somatic Therapy is effective in the treatment of trauma. One of its benefits is that it does not require individuals to recall the difficult details of traumatic events, but rather focuses on locating where bodily sensations are stored as it relates to trauma. When focusing on the sensations where trauma is stored, trauma can be processed out of the body.
If you are considering starting your journey towards dealing with unresolved trauma, anxiety, or nervous system dysregulation, contact one of our experienced Somatic Therapists for a free 15 minute consult!
https://www.verywellhealth.com/somatic-trauma-therapy-5218970
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/therapy-types/somatic-therapy
https://positivepsychology.com/somatic-experiencing/
https://psychcentral.com/lib/somatic-therapy-exercises-for-trauma#grounding
https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/living-well/the-befenits-of-somatic-exercises/