What is Somatic Therapy (and does it work)?
Somatic Therapy defined
We all experience ourselves and the world through thoughts, feelings and body sensations, what Buddhist psychology calls The Triangle of Awareness. Take a moment to think about this. Can you think of any other ways? Sometimes people say spirituality, but spirituality too is experienced in these three ways.
Traditional therapy focuses on the first two, thoughts and feelings. This leaves out a major component of our experience. After all, our bodies are not just there to carry our heads around. Our brains, where we do our thinking, are part of our bodies. Our feelings take place in our bodies; our hearts race, our stomachs clench, our throat tightens.
Somatic therapy includes thoughts and feelings, and of course, a building trust between client and therapist. But what sets somatic therapy apart is that it adds in the body as well.
Somatic work notices what the body seems to be telling us, and tracks your arousal as well as your ability to regulate. This helps your nervous system come back into balance and gain resilience.
After a traumatic event, the body’s self-regulation response can get thrown out of balance. Somatic therapy helps to restore the body’s self-regulation so that symptoms ease and we feel a sense of safety.
Why do some people become traumatized and others don’t?
We all process traumatic events differently based on a whole host of factors including our biology, our history, and our family histories.After 9/11, some people close to the scene were not highly traumatized while others who were across the country were highly impacted. This has nothing to do with a moral failure or courage.
Risk factors for developing PTSD include:
Childhood trauma, neglect, abandonment
A history of trauma
Lack of a strong support system
Maladaptive coping strategies such as self-blame, guilt and shame
A personal or family history of mental illness or substance abuse
Dissociation during and after the event
Being unable to move into action, due to an injury, a freeze response,illness, pain
Experiencing an additional loss after the events, such as a death, the loss of a home.
What happens in a Somatic Therapy Session?
We don’t do “Somatic Therapy Sessions”. We have an integrated approach using everything in our training, professional experience, life experience, heart and intuition.
We generally categorize our focus areas as Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Mindfulness and Attachment Repair but we will flow easily from one to another as the need arises. All of this is embedded in relational talk therapy rather than a series of techniques that are applied to our clients.
While EMDR has a very specific approach, Somatic work looks different depending on the day, the therapist, the client. We may work with past memories or only in the present moment. With people who have early trauma from before they had words and memories, we can work with the body which continues to have strong emotions and dysregulated patterns. We help you come out of highly activated states of flight, fright and freeze and into a more regulated experience and we do this by not retraumatizing and overwhelming your nervous system.
How does Somatic Therapy provide relief?
Good somatic therapy creates a safe experience for you to process past trauma.
In normal circumstances, your experiences are stored in your short-term memory and then move to your long-term memory. That’s why you remember recent events more clearly than ones that happened a week, a year, many years ago.
After an event that traumatizes you, however, the memory stays in your short-term storage and doesn’t move to long-term. When a memory comes up, it feels immediate, as if it is happening again in the present moment and it’s overwhelming. You might have flashbacks or dreams; you might avoid people, places and thoughts that trigger this whirlwind in you.
Once you process the trauma through Somatic Therapy, the memory goes from short term memory storage into long term memory storage. Your mind and body have not just a cognitive understanding that the event is in the past but an embodied sense that it happened in the past. You feel that it is behind you and that you are safe now. No longer stuck in the past, you can move forward in your life without that weight.
What does Somatic Therapy Treat?
Somatic Therapy is very effective for stress disorders and trauma. It is proven to work for people with anxiety, fear, and depression, even if you have not experienced relief with talk therapy.
Your symptoms of stress and PTSD may show up as:
Isolating and loneliness
Dizziness, headaches
Trouble with cognitive processes like memory, attention and thinking
Cognitive problems
Memory problems both in the present & not having a clear idea of what happened during the trauma, or not remembering significant portions of your life
Dissociation (feeling that you are not always in your body, spaciness, numbness)
Anxiety and panic attacks
Difficulty regulating emotions
Fatigue
Physical pain
Fear
Guilt
Shame
Insomnia
Digestive troubles
Sexual problems
Is Somatic Therapy Legit?
Somatic Experiencing is an effective method of treatment with an experienced practitioner. Here at Cutting Edge Counseling, we have been treating clients with great success using Somatic Therapy since 2006.
Somatic therapy is highly effective and scientifically proven to provide relief for stress disorders and trauma.
In 2017, the Journal of Trauma and Stress published a randomized controlled study to understand how somatic therapy worked for people with PTSD diagnoses.
The results offer a lot of hope for those who have not experienced healing from talk therapy: the findings show “significant intervention effects” in terms of the intensity of individuals’ PTSD and depression symptoms.
Additionally, a randomized controlled study published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology found that those with chronic pain and PTSD found that Somatic Therapy was more effective in treating both conditions than the standard back pain treatments of supervised exercises.
Other studies have shown Somatic Therapy to support PTSD in women who are refugees, and to even be a PTSD prevention tool for Children and Teens immediately after a traumatic event.
Find relief with Somatic Therapy
If you’re seeking Somatic Therapy from licensed therapists in Los Angeles, we invite you to contact us for a 15-minute phone consultation. It’s free, confidential and we’re easy to talk to.
