What is Somatic Therapy and How Can It Help You to Heal?
Please find below some information about what Emotional Processing (Somatic Therapy) is, what it can help with. More details will be explained in terms of the process when we meet in a session:
Emotional Processing (Somatic Healing) takes a ‘bottom-up’ approach to healing unprocessed stress and trauma, as the root of these emotional sensations are stored in the body. Somatic practitioners work with the emotional imprints/trauma loops stuck in the nervous system (flight /flight /freeze /fawn responses) by creating a place of safety (a resource) for the client first, then using gentle somatic techniques that allow exploration of the emotional charges in our bodies, expanding our tolerance to feeling these emotions, allowing a sense of completion in the nervous system so it can come back down to homeostasis, (rest and digest). This helps to complete the emotional loop, building a window of tolerance in our nervous system, expanding our capacity to invite back in the difficult emotions in our body with a sense of compassion, safety and support.
Trauma/stress is experienced as any kind of acutely painful situation. All humans experience stress and trauma in their lives in some way; some big T traumas (acute or developmental trauma in childhood), some little T traumas (seemingly less harmful incidents such as an incident of bullying, or rejection by a friend group, a breakup, painful incidents that happen throughout our lives yet can greatly undermine our sense of safety and sense of self in the world).
If the emotions we experience are not fully processed through the body at the time of the incident of stress or trauma, the emotion stays stored as a trauma loop or emotional imprint that gets triggered in the body every time there is a similar emotional upset, or a familiar feeling that makes the felt sense in the body react and the nervous system to go on high alert. As children we needed safe adults, or as adults our safe loved ones to help us regulate our nervous systems. To regulate, our bodies need to respond by crying or shaking, we need to be held, listened to, believed, understood, we need to feel secure and grounded again after a stressful event and we need safe and regulated people around us to help us get there. However, this is often not the case. If we have had our emotions invalidated or ignored, if we feel we have no one to talk to, if we are, or feel we are, still in danger, or living in highly stressful environments, we can get stuck in a sympathetic survival state of constant fight/flight making us feel anxious, sad, angry, fearful, frustrated, etc, or if completely overwhelmed, we may tip into a what is called a dorsal vagal high tone parasympathetic state of freeze (numbness) or fawn (perfectionism, people pleasing) etc.
None of us like the discomfort of challenging feelings, so very early on in our lives, even as babies, we learn adaptive behaviours to avoid feeling emotional pain. When we are not held safe and emotionally validated as children, we may go on to believe there is something essentially wrong with us. This vague sense of ‘wrongness’ is called a Core Wound, held in our subconscious mind, making us somehow feel that we are essentially flawed. When this happens, we often suppress how we really feel, or we explode, we pretend, we avoid, we people please, we become perfectionists. And then as adults, as we get further and further away from our authentic selves because of all the adaptive behaviours we use to try to be seen as ‘good enough’ or we feel shame for acting out in ways that don't feel right but we can't seem to help doing. This often leads us to use various Coping Mechanisms to help us emotionally cope with life, many of them harm us more than help us.
Addictions of all kinds are Coping Mechanisms, whether it is drugs, alcohol, food, work, shopping, etc. We use coping mechanisms to avoid the big feelings of shame, anger, sadness, guilt and fear that a dysregulated nervous system gives us when stuck in survival mode.
Dysregulated nervous systems and continually suppressed emotions can lead to chronic anxious or sad feelings, physical illness, constant overwhelming sense of dread and burnout. This is where the looping comes in. We try to avoid difficult feelings but the feelings get triggered by similar situations, our nervous system goes into fight or flight, we try to avoid the difficult emotions or we act out in unhelpful ways, we then feel shame and anguish so we use adaptive behaviours and coping mechanisms trying to soothe ourselves but nothing really works for long because the trauma is still living in our bodies.
Trauma/dysregulated nervous systems cannot be healed with cognition (the brain thinking things through) as the emotional imprint was created in the nervous system. Any event that makes the body contract inwards, that doesn’t get emotional completion, loops around and around in the nervous system becoming the trigger. That trigger, that charged sensation, is what needs to be compassionately invited back into your awareness, giving it a sense of home and security in the body.
With Emotional Processing, the emotions we have orphaned (shut off from) are allowed a space within us, with compassion and non-judgement, we welcome all of ourselves back home, creating a secure container within our body to hold space for all of who we are, for all we have experienced. All of who we are is welcome in this space. We are enough, we are worthy, we are whole, for all we are and all we are not.
