Why Somatics
Why Somatic Psychotherapy?
An awareness of the body and nervous system in psychotherapy using somatic principles allows for the therapist and client to closely tailor a therapy session to the client’s needs. When we are more aware of our nervous system and body’s capacity, we are less likely to push passed our body’s signals or overwhelm our system while sharing and processing our experiences in therapy.
An awareness of the body/soma helps us to gather more information on how an event, a memory, or a thought pattern affects us physically and emotionally. We can build an understanding of the protective mechanisms we have developed in order to keep our psyches and bodies safe during challenging moments and events in our lives.
Our threat responses are highly protective and adaptive. They are the responses that kept us sane through experiences that were too overwhelming or intense in the past, experiences our nervous systems did not have “capacity” for. We can find ourselves in habitual fight, flight, or freeze because these threat responses were “thwarted:” we were not able to fight something off (fight response), leave a situation (flight response), or safely move out of a dissociated state (freeze). These patterns not only show up physically, but in our thought patterns and belief systems as well.
Using somatic principles, we learn to “complete” old threat responses that were thwarted. As we complete threat responses, newfound energy flows through the body, because we no longer have to expend so much energy to working with our trauma responses.
In the somatic perspective, the presence of another nervous system (our therapist), who has capacity for the client’s experience, widens the therapeutic container so that together, the therapeutic dynamic can hold the experiences, emotions, and trauma surfacing in the individual.
As we gradually meet our experience with care and curiosity, we increase our nervous system’s capacity to experience our emotions and reactions (“regulation”). We slowly awaken to the emotions and experiences living inside of us that we did not have the space or relational safely to connect to before. As we grow our capacity to experience ourselves and our inner landscape, we grow our capacity to experience a greater spectrum of life and all it has to offer us.
