Clarity Somatic Therapies

Working Somatically: Teletherapy for mind and body

Experiences such as overwhelm, anxiety, grief, depression, and trauma affect our bodies as well our minds. Working somatically means including an awareness of the body—our sensations, our nervous system, our boundaries—in the work we do together. The body does not hold onto stories the same way the mind does, but it can get stuck in a stress response that disrupts our ability to function mentally, emotionally, and physically. When we work with the body, we don’t have to go back into our stories and traumas as much as we heal from them. Instead we attend to what the body is experiencing in the moment and allow it to move through its innate process towards balance and regulation, and then our thoughts and emotions can shift too.

When our environment lacks the safety and security we need due to systems of power, privilege, oppression, and/or ongoing threat, working somatically helps to build our inner resources and regulate our bodies so we can become more resilient to stress.

Somatic Counseling

A safe, therapeutic partnership allows you to explore things that feel too big to hold alone. A somatic (body-based) approach to counseling helps you do this gently and slowly so you feel less overwhelmed and more able to handle whatever comes along, internally or in your environment.

Somatic counseling can be seen as an agreement between client and therapist to include body awareness in discussions about our thoughts and emotions. There are a variety of methods that can be used to do this, from psychoeducation about the nervous system, to present-moment sensation tracking, to exploring “felt sense” experiences that arise in the body. For clients experiencing little or no body sensation or who are “up in their heads,” somatic counseling offers a way to move down into our hearts, our gut, and our embodied experience. It offers a way to gently hold strong emotions and overwhelming experiences inside the containment of our physical bodies. If you find it difficult to regulate both your emotions and sensations, you can find relief, support, and empowerment in a somatic approach that embraces your whole being.

 My Approach: Somatic Experiencing®

Somatic Experiencing is a mind-body approach to the healing of trauma and other stress-related conditions that addresses our physiology and biology in addition to our emotions. Somatic Experiencing dialogue slowly releases shock within the body from a wide variety of stressors including psychological, developmental, and physical factors. This technique can be verbal only or, with consent, can include physical touch that contributes to emotional and physiological regulation.

In Somatic Experiencing, we don’t look at the traumatic event itself as the cause of trauma. Instead, we look at how the body’s response to perceived threat has caused the nervous system to become unbalanced. This allows us to focus on the body memory and not the story.

The biological stress (fight, flight freeze) response is like a peak that rises, falls, and generally resolves on its own once a perceived threat has passed. When we get stuck at the top of the peak, we can use some help to come back down. When we get stuck near the bottom of the peak, we can use some support to get moving. Somatic Experiencing teaches you how to manage your own stress responses, first with support (called co-regulation) and eventually on your own (self-regulation).

Somatic Experiencing benefits clients who feel “stuck” or “frozen” in their minds and bodies, or unable to return to feelings of normalcy after an overwhelming experience.

Learn more about Somatic Experiencing at traumahealing.org.

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