WHAT IS SOMATIC THERAPY?
Somatic therapies help us access the body to integrate our physical beings into our other human areas - including our psychology, spirituality, and our cognition. In a general sense, integrating our bodies into the therapeutic process can foster wellbeing, growth, and integration. More specifically, somatic therapies can help promote healing of trauma, grief, anxiety, depression, attachment concerns, and more.
Somatic therapies work on a biological and neurobiological level. As we change the way our body and nervous system respond to stressors, relationships, memories, triggers, and traumas in our life, our body teaches the brain to rewire neurological connections and pathways that have likely been laid down early on in life. As we refine our skills of interoception, which is our ability to feel inside our bodies into our different body systems, we engage parts of our brain that assist us in regulating during our big emotional experiences.
The body is known to hold a lot of knowledge. This knowledge can be related to past traumatic experiences, where our bodies store the felt sense of the experience at the nervous system level. On a relational level, the body’s nervous system reactions can help us make sense and interpret our experiences with individuals we are in relationship with. And, perhaps most importantly, the body can hold some of the answers of what is needed for healing, which can be done through tracking and following the body’s reactions towards wellness, towards parasympathetic nervous system responses, and towards feelings of safety and security in the body.
DIFFERENT SOMATIC APPROACHES
Somatic Experiencing®
Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) is a somatic psychotherapy that helps people heal trauma by helping clients draw attention to their bodies and avoids directly evoking traumatic memories. SE™ is the life’s work of Peter Levine Ph.D., and is evidenced to treat trauma and stress disorders for more than four decades. SE™ combines biology, neuroscience, stress physiology, psychology, ethology, indigenous healing practices, and biophysics.
How does Somatic Experiencing® work?
Somatic Experiencing® views trauma as producing a highly energetic response in the body, known as the fight/flight/freeze response. When we are reliving trauma, traumatic shock is stored in our body and may result in negative symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
SE™ techniques bring coherence into the nervous system while discharging and integrating energy from your body. People develop increasing awareness and tolerance for difficult body sensations and emotions. This allows people to reorganize their nervous systems towards a new healthier, happier way of being.
Therapists trained in SE™ use a framework to determine where a client may be stuck in a physiological response (fight/flight/freeze) and provide clinical tools to help resolve those fixed states. These tools help release traumatic shock from the body and thus transform and heal old patterns in the nervous system caused by post traumatic stress, emotional wounds, and developmental/childhood traumas.
hakomi
Hakomi is a somatic psychotherapy that uses mindfulness to transform core material, limiting beliefs, negative inner voices, and symptoms from painful life events including developmental/childhood wounds. Hakomi was originated by Ron Kurtz in the 1970’s and is an effective therapy that is used internationally. Hakomi originates from general systems theory, modern body-centered therapies, as well as Taoism and Buddhism; Hakomi does not impose nor require any belief systems.
How does Hakomi work?
Hakomi uses tools in mindfulness to help evoke experiences that lead to self-discovery, which often results in change and transformation. Self-discovery, experiments, and integrating these changes are core facets of Hakomi. Clients may be guided to focus on what is going on in their body in the therapy session. The goal is to produce long lasting shifts that facilitate new perspectives and ways of being, building resilience and balance.
Hakomi is rooted in five principles:
Mindfulness: Mindfulness helps guide the discovery of underlying emotions and historical patterns that are contributing to what you are struggling with.
Non-violence: Non-violence permits safety to turn our attention inwards and time is taken to establish a good, trusting working relationship.
Unity: Unity honors that all parts of the self and living systems are important and included.
Organicity: Organicity believes that healing happens from within while also working with what is arising in the present moment.
Mind-Body Holism: Mind-Body Holism acknowledges that components of both the mind and body are essential in healing and transforming emotional and traumatic wounds.
SENSORIMOTOR PSYCHOTHERAPY
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) is a complete therapeutic modality for trauma and attachment issues. SP welcomes the body as an integral source of information which can guide resourcing and the accessing and processing of challenging, traumatic, and developmental experience. SP is a holistic approach that includes somatic, emotional, and cognitive processing and integration.
How does Sensorimotor Psychotherapy work?
Using some of the same principles of Hakomi, SP enables clients to discover and change habitual physical and psychological patterns that impede optimal functioning and well-being. SP is helpful in working with dysregulated activation and other effects of trauma, as well as the limiting belief systems of developmental issues.
It is thought that SP strengthens instinctual capacities for survival and assists clients to re-instate or develop resources which were unavailable or missing at the time the trauma or wounding occurred. Once resources are developed and in place, the traumatic event can be processed with the aid of resources. SP also helps clients cultivate their strengths, while providing enough challenge to stimulate growth, long lasting change, and well-being.
SP uses a three-phase treatment approach to gently guide the client through the therapeutic process – Safety and Stabilization, Processing, and Integration. Therapist and client collaboration are essential to the SP approach. The therapist must pay close attention to the client to ensure that they are not overwhelmed by the process while simultaneously engaging their own abilities and capacities for healing.
EXPRESSIVE ART THERAPY
Based on the assumption that people can heal through self-discovery, creative expression help clients tap into their body sensations, perceptions and senses, nervous system, emotions, and thought processes in profound ways. Clients explore their inner world through pictures, sounds, imagery, storytelling, dance, music, drama, poetry, movement, horticulture, and visual arts in an integrated way, to facilitate growth and healing.
WORK WITH ONE OF OUR SOMATIC THERAPISTS TODAY
Although all of our therapists work with body awareness, here is a list of therapists who have received specialized training in various somatic approaches: Pinar Bereketoglu, Margot Crane, Cyndi Millett, Dena Samimi-Ward, and Jody Summerfield.