Why Somatic therapy?
Understanding some therapy terminology can also help you find a therapist that will work for you.
In this post I wanted to speak to a prominent modality that has many diverse expressions. Somatic therapy is a broad term to describe a therapeutic approach that emphasizes the body of the client. There are many ways this might happen, although generally in therapy we are focusing on the experience inside our bodies. This is what Gendlin (1) and later Peter Levine (2) have called the felt sense.
In Ancient Greek, soma meant '“body.” The famous researcher and British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (3) termed the connection between mind and body psychesoma. One could argue that the whole of psychotherapeutic history is based on an assumed and observed connection between body and mind.
There are many strands of somatic theory that run through the history of psychotherapy. Rather than just listing them I want to focus more on the why and how of somatic therapy in a general sense.
Somatic therapy is about the body-mind connection
That is the simplest way to understand it. More and more we understand that body and mind are not somehow isolated, but are interwoven. In Dan Siegel’s (cite) work he discusses the embodied brain, the mind, and relationships as all being connected. In traditional forms of medicine this is also understood in great depth such as in Ayurveda, Tibetan, and Chinese medical systems.
In the context of therapy, when we pay attention to the body we are recognizing that our bodies are intimately involve with our psychological lives. Emotions are not abstract thought-based experiences, rather they occur in our bodies as different kinds of sensations and felt-experiences. For example when we are scared we might have a pit in our stomach. This connection isn’t some isolated event. Our bodies are always giving and receiving signals. And when we experience emotion, it is a bodily experience.
So why does this matter for therapy? Again, here I am talking in the most general sense…
Most of us have an ambivalent relationship with our body-experience. I am not just talking about body-image, but our actual experience in our bodies. This is what I call interiority. Most of us are not taught how to relate to our emotions or interiority from a young age. We go to school, and we begin our cognitive development. Meanwhile, our emotional development is less emphasized.
If we have experienced trauma or even more subtle emotional neglect, our ability to process and release our emotions does not develop evenly. We rely on adults to teach us how to relate to these very scary and intense feelings inside of us, and if they aren’t there or they hurt us when we have strong feelings we actually don’t develop the capacity to digest our emotional states. Sometimes they get frozen, sometimes they come out in other ways. All of this plays out in the body. Not just in our thoughts.
Decades of research around attachment suggests that our nervous system, and our ability to feel soothed as young children is totally dependent on our caretakers. Our nervous systems develop in relationship to our caretakers. I know parents feel a lot of pressure around this, and it isn’t my goal to blame anyone. This is just the truth that psychologists have observed and it makes sense intuitively.
In my experience, working with thoughts just isn’t enough
Some forms of therapy and new-age thought focus very much on our thinking. This can be helpful because our thoughts do strongly influence our experience. However, often what I find is clients use their thoughts to criticize their emotional reactions rather than learning to relate to them. This keeps them stuck in neutral. Because if we keep having to fight the emotion that comes up we are going to have to tense or shut down more. This is a survival response.
So what I tell clients is that we can’t impose the rules of the left-brain (cognition, language) on the right-brain (emotion, intuition). While this may be an oversimplification of brain anatomy, I find it to be helpful. So many of us want our emotions to be a certain way. Most often it is some version of “I shouldn’t feel _______.” We try to set rational parameters for what is acceptable to feel, and what is not.
But that is not how our right brain works. When we have a feeling, it just happens. If we expend so much energy telling ourselves it shouldn’t be happening we are just going to tense more… and that is going to exacerbate experiences anxiety and depression. I have never seen anyone make progress by rejecting their experience. This is a survival strategy, not a therapeutic strategy.
We need to be able to learn that we can tolerate emotions in our body, and the way we do that is by learning to contact them with our attention, to be curious with sensations in our bodies. Often we need help to learn how to do this! Otherwise we stay in our automatic rejection and avoidance patterns. The good news is that it is a skill that can be gradually developed, like a muscle.
Sometimes we are going to do whatever we can to not feel what we are feeling because it’s too painful. And that can be okay, too. We just want to begin to notice the way our fear causes us to disconnect from ourselves moment-by-moment without pressure.
If you want to explore Somatic Therapy further, reach out for a free consultation. I’d be glad to discuss how it may help you.
References:
(1) Gendlin, E. (1978). Focusing
(2). Levine, P. (1997). Waking the tiger.
(3) Winnicott, D.W. (1954). Mind and it’s relation to psychesoma: https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Winnicott_PsycheSoma.pdf