How I found my way to being a Somatic Trauma Specialist
If you’re curious about your therapist, you can pretty much presume that their specialty is a significant part of their history, or at least a subject that has a serious fascination for them. So if you’re seeing a trauma therapist, bingo!, they’ve likely had a lot of trauma and were both wanting to find healing for themselves along with healing for others.
How Psychotherapy is Evolving
Scientific knowledge is constantly evolving and psychotherapy, which is both an art and a science, is as well. I have had the fortune to work in a time of great leaps forward in neuroscience. The explosion of awareness informed by neurobiology and systemic oppression has been game-changing.
Long before I went to graduate school I volunteered at a counseling center seeing many clients with financial, medical, transportation, housing and childcare issues. Many were up against the -isms, racism, classism,sexism, heterosexism, antisemitism but this part of the human experience was barely touched on in school. Mostly there was a vague stricture to be “culturally sensitive.”
How PTSD was defined in 1980
In 1980 the diagnosis of PTSD was first added to the DSM (the diagnostic manual used by healthcare professionals) but it was framed as catastrophic events such as war, the Nazi Holocaust, volcanic eruptions, and airplane crashes. Reactions to less dramatic or visible events or circumstances were viewed through the lenses of anxiety, panic or an “adjustment disorder.”
Later I had a general private practice, seeing clients with anxiety, depression and all kinds of relationship difficulties. We didn’t use the lens of trauma as one possible and impactful cause of these issues. I never planned to be a trauma specialist, or a somatic trauma therapist for that matter, because we didn’t think in those terms in 1991.
Adding EMDR
In 1995, having only been licensed as a psychotherapist for a couple of years, I heard about EMDR as an amazing new technique that could make people feel better in a handful of sessions. Frustrated with the limits of talk therapy, I signed up for the first training, did a powerful practice session that first weekend in which my “client” spontaneously made new meaning of the traumatic event that had defined his life. I was sold.
Over time I became frustrated with the limits of my training. EMDR was a powerful tool and I used it all the time. It worked quickly, put people in a relaxed state so they could go back through traumatic experiences without being retraumatized, didn’t require a lot of talking so it was also good for teens and people who aren’t very verbal. It softened and blurred the visual memory and often produced a spontaneous, positive change in the client’s beliefs. That’s a lot!
Adding Somatic Experiencing
And yet, it didn’t do . . . something. I didn’t know what that something was but I went in search of it. Fortunately in 2006 Lee Ann and I found Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and began many years of training.
It was around this time we started to think of ourselves as trauma specialists.
Now it seems inevitable that, in stumbling towards more education and training in how to help my clients, I have become a somatic trauma therapist. In incorporating my longtime meditation skills, attachment repair and Buddhism-informed psychological perspective, we have put together an integrative and well-rounded approach to repair trauma.
New Hope for Healing Trauma
It wasn’t until 2013 when UCLA sponsored the Relationships and Neuroplasticity in Relationships Conference. The big news, and it really was big news, was that we can create new neural pathways. Now it seems almost comical that neuroplasticity and the concept of the brain being able to change in positive ways felt so new, but it offered scientific confirmation and enormous hope that we can heal from trauma.
“Trauma” is currently THE psychological buzzword. Almost all mental healthcare professionals understand that we are seeing people with trauma frequently and that trauma is not in the event but in the body.
What isn’t more broadly understood is that trauma recovery is not simply a matter of a cognitive understanding or behavioral change. Trauma dysregulates the nervous system and leaves a physical imprint, changing your brain and how memories are stored. The body must be included in the therapeutic process in order for lasting change to occur. To put it more broadly, the mind, the heart and the body all need to be included.
Somatic Skills for Everyone
My deep hope is that in the future some of the basic principles of somatic therapies will be known by all and not just by somatic trauma specialists. The body responds to simple interventions that are accessible to everyone. In fact, if a person is in high-arousal, they may be unable to follow complicated instructions due to a freeze response or dissociation.
It is common practice for national and international crisis response teams to go to impacted areas and teach community members somatic techniques for maximum impact and outreach.
A few of these pocket-sized skills are:
Orienting
Grounding
Shaking it off
Touch
Self-Resourcing
Simple, simple, simple. Body-based interventions focus on regulating the nervous system and reduce the potential for re-traumatization. Regardless of gender, culture, age, and language differences, they work more quickly and more effectively than psychological interventions and can be simply demonstrated by anyone.
One of the thrilling things about being a therapist using cutting edge technology is that we always have the opportunity for growth and learning, for feeling safe enough for more parts of our authentic self to emerge, for letting go of limiting beliefs and expanding our knowledge of how to help ourselves and others in the challenges and grace of living in a human body.
Note: You may want to read my blog “Is EMDR a Miracle Cure?” for a more nuanced view of what EMDR can and cannot do.
