About Somatic Therapy
What is trauma and what’s just stress?
Trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk offers this short video about trauma.
Trauma can push our autonomic nervous system (ANS) to adapt in ways that are hard to live with. We can become easily triggered, or feel emotions that are connected to the past. Somatic therapy can help us to release patterns that are remembered in the body.
‘Somatic’ means a focus on the body – so our feelings, rather than the mind and our thinking.
Why work somatically?
In many situations we can talk through our problems, we re-tell our story to find solutions and change our behaviours. Many types of therapy work this way. But not everything is a story…
- You might feel anxiety, or feelings that don’t match your current reality.
- Maybe everything is ok but you don’t feel ok.
- Sometimes you find you are triggered into extreme feelings and it’s really uncomfortable.
- Maybe you feel numb a lot of the time.
- Just not feeling right somehow and you are not sure what the problem is.
- If so, we need to work with the ‘somatic’ system, the body processes, often the ones that are under the control of your autonomic nervous system.
- The autonomic nervous system can remember, just like your immune system does. It remembers and reacts, even after the original problem has long gone.
How does Somatic Therapy work?
Our body can go into an activated process, in response to a memory, a thought, or even just a smell – there are lots of potential triggers. If the body has remembered something upsetting, it very sensibly starts to defend itself – automatically, by using the autonomic nervous system. The body might move into flight and fight (fear, anxiety, fidgeting, distractions), or dissociation (switched off feelings, zoning-out, can’t stay connected).
The body would like to process that activation. Instead, people are often taught to do something else. They may be taught to interrupt or stop the autonomic processes, using distraction, or mind habits, or, with activities such as yoga or sports.
Ordinarily, all of those tools; distractions, mind habits, yoga or sports, are healthy ways to focus the mood and body. For instance, sports can help the autonomic nervous system to be flexible – to become activated, and then relax again afterward. However, when we use them against the body – like always stopping the body from processing anxiety, then we are using those tools against our own body system.
Somatic therapy offers the body a way to offload the tensions it has built up, and to process them slowly, in an organic way. We sit quietly and allow the body to have time to process. The therapist will guide you in what to pay attention to. Somatic therapy is focussed on body feelings, which might be things like muscle tensions, or changes in breathing patterns.
This therapy is slow, gentle and you remain in full control at all times.
Integration work
After experiences with plant medicine or recreational drugs it is useful to re-balance the nervous system, which can be done with this therapy system. See the integration page for more information.