What is Somatic Therapy?

Somatic means “of the body”--our soma is our body. So, somatic therapy is therapy that works through the body.
 
When things happen to us, pleasant or unpleasant, they are processed and stored in the body. When I think of my dog, a smile comes to my face, I feel a softening in my chest, I get an upward motion zing of delight through my core all the way to the top of my head. When I think of the dog that bit me, my nose crunches up in what feels like disgust, I feel the part of my hand that was bit open, with a tender memory of the pain. I don’t like staying with that memory, I can feel my desire to turn away.
The two dogs are just thoughts but I experience the feelings associated with each dog in my body. 

This is a core concept of working somatically--feelings are EVIDENCE. Thoughts might not be evidence. I might have a tendency to project into the future to prepare for what might happen but has not happened. I might speculate about what other people are saying about me. I might misremember a detail as way worse or way better than it actually was. Memories might be quite reliable, but our thoughts might not be. Feelings in our bodies, however, are REAL.

This is the physiological material of our experiences in our cells in our bodies. Pleasurable hormones fill my cells when I think of my dog. Hormones associated with disgust fill my cells when I think of the dog that bit me. Associated neurological pathways fire. This is a material experience in the body. 

Much of somatic therapy is learning to track sensations in our bodies. If we can allow our bodies to experience a manageable feeling, let it come on, rise up, peak, and dissipate, we have processed a piece of physiological material. This means the neurobiology associated with an event or memory gets to physically change states--from inactive to active to inactive again. This means we survived this piece of activity. So the nervous system then gets to integrate that the experience was doable, and able to survive in that amount. This is how we actually change--from the bottom up, processing from the inside where the experiences are stored in our cells, to then integrate into our lived experience. 
     
If I think of just a piece of the memory of the dog bite, say the pain in my hand after it happened, I can assess if this is a manageable amount of stimulation in my body. It feels a bit uncomfortable, I can feel a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach, but I still feel present, and I’m willing to be curious about my experience. Soon, just staying with the manageable feeling in my stomach, it changes, it starts to get less intense and I feel a wave of energy move upward in my torso. As I stay tracking my sensations, I notice the feeling is much less intense in my gut. I stay longer and the feeling is totally gone. Even though this bite happened when I was maybe nine years old, there is still some energy around it--in fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever given this event much attention at all. Now there is a soothing pulse in my gut where the sour feeling was before. I can notice the evidence of change in my sensations. Something changed, I changed. 

When I first started working somatically, I was amazed at how big the shifts felt from what seemed like doing very little. Touching into just a small piece of anger felt so big and scary. Then this big experience would show up again and again in my life--that I could touch anger, but it was still scary. Then it started to feel less big as I practiced touching anger. Then I felt empowered by my anger instead of scared. I clearly remember when I could feel what people meant by anger being life force energy--your life force defending itself. I could feel my life force instead of feeling afraid. I’m still in awe of this shift.
 
If I told myself I was brave or powerful, or analyzed my experiences that led to persistent disempowerment, I don’t believe I could have found my life force. I had to learn to FEEL my anger as a legitimate emotion that I am now safe to feel. I had to experience this emotion in my body. 

There’s more I want to share about working somatically--specifically what somatic therapy entails or what might happen in a session. For now, I’m honoring your intelligent nervous system that knows how to feel.

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