What is Somatic Therapy?
What is somatic therapy?
Soma = the whole being (brain, body, and self), as experienced within, rather than observed externally.
Somatics means “of the body”, so it follows that somatic therapy is focused on working with the body.
This is in contrast to talk therapies that have dominated in recent decades, that primarily focus on self-understanding through the mind.
What sets somatic therapy apart from other body-based methods is its focus on the internal, felt experience of your unique body and nervous system. The primary modality I offer in somatic therapy is Somatic Experiencing®, a structured, evidence-based method rooted in a comprehensive 3-year training programme.
For decades, chronic stress and trauma were seen as psychological issues to be processed through the mind. However, there has been a paradigm shift in our understanding of these issues thanks to research in neuroscience and the body’s physiology.
It’s now clear that trauma is not just stored as a memory, set of emotions, or belief – but as dysregulation in the autonomic nervous system, manifesting in chronic survival states such as fight, flight, or freeze; along with incomplete defensive responses.
Many of us instinctively know this, or have experienced the limits of talk therapy and sense there is a deeper intelligence in the body seeking attention.
Our bodies may still feel unsafe or dysregulated, even when our mind “knows” things are okay.
Self-understanding is useful, but has its limits. Studies show that lasting healing often requires bottom-up approaches, where the body and nervous system is supported to lead.
The body needs to be given time, space, and support to complete the stress cycles it never got a chance to finish.
After experiencing a car accident, my personal experience of anxiety ramped up several notches and started to drastically interfere with daily life.
Talking about it didn’t help (and actually made the anxiety ramp up further).
I remember seeking answers everywhere, telling others that “it feels like my biology has fundamentally changed”.
Using somatic therapy to attend to traumas big and small, the body has a chance to return to better regulation. This means that the autonomic nervous system can shift out of being stuck in survival mode, to a state of flow and healthy functioning.
From the inside out, this might feel like more safety, ease, and balance.
And depending how autonomic nervous system dysregulation has shaped you, in practice this might result in:
A reduction in anxiety and panic
Regaining life force after burnout
Shifting out of depression and stuckness
An ease in chronic pain and other chronic symptoms
Living life with less wear and tear – from chronic stress to resilience
A greater capacity for joy and connection in daily life.
Interested in somatic therapy using Somatic Experiencing®?
Enquire here about somatic trauma therapy online sessions. Limited spaces are also available in person in Auckland, New Zealand. I provide a free 30-minute intro call to explore working together and answer your questions.
Further reading
There are tons of resources out there if you want to learn more. Great places to start include The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, anything on Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Porges, Peter Levine’s books (the founder of Somatic Experiencing®), and Widen the Window by Elizabeth Stanley.
Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash