What is Somatics?
I first came across somatics on the trauma aspects of my first 200 hour yoga teacher training course and then at deeper levels on my yoga for trauma training.
Somatics is a bottom up approach where we heal through body practises such as conscious breathing and movement for the participant to observe an internal experience. As body/brain relationship of communication is 80/20, it makes sense that this is effective in healing trauma.
We humans have the ability to disrupt our emotions and the cycles of nature in our bodies which we need to do on occasion for survival.
The problem is we are disrupting them too much which interferes with the body’s ability to heal and we don’t have processes to complete them after traumatic events which are a natural part of life.
“Emotions are cycles that happen in your body. They are neurological events which happen in your whole nervous system and brain. The intelligence of your body extends to our nervous system from your head right down to your toes. Also beyond our skin.
Emotions are an involuntary neurological responses which have a beginning, middle and end.”
– Emily and Amelia Naagoski,Burnout.
Somatic therapy holds the belief that trauma can be held in body, and needs support in releasing traumatic energy to come back to safety.
When a traumatic event happens our bodies choose automatically and unconsciously the best response for our survival from fight, flee, freeze, fawn.
If we are women and children, we are more likely to freeze or fawn as the method of survival due our less dominant physical make-up.
This means as a survival method we suppress the want to scream and fight etc.
Peter Levine’s work looks at this in depth in his book “Waking the Tiger”
It highlights that when we look at animals who play dead, ie freeze to survive a traumatic incident like getting chased by tiger, the animal recovers by
- slowly breathing
- followed by vigorous shaking
Levine notes how humans do not have this process for integrating post traumatic events which he believes is factor to why people get stuck in traumatic states and suffer symptoms of PTSD.
People with PTSD can struggle to ever feel relaxed, hyper vigilant and struggle to be still.
Whereas the animals that were observed after trauma, who breathed and shook, were able to relax and play freely post traumatic event.
Somatic therapy is where the person is supported to safely feel internal sensations and describe their internal world when thinking or talking about past experiences.
By consciously diverting more attention to the breath and body, the body can complete whatever cycles it needs to do to come into the parasympathetic system, and be able to relax.
Talk therapy is very effective for a lot of people.
It was for me, however it only got me so far.
Talk therapy made my brain, which didn’t think I had trauma and did not know how disconnected it was from my body, accept those and understand why I needed to heal and why I behaved the way I did. Unprocessed trauma was why I was so disconnected from myself and lost. I didn’t know where I wanted my life to go or what brought me joy.
Once I understood healing on a cognitive level, I then had to go to feeling modalities of healing.
People can get stuck in telling the story of their traumas but never feel the emotions of them which is what heals and frees us.
Anything that helps you get into your body and for your body to be boss for a period of time can be somatic therapy – yoga, breathwork, free movement.
The intention in Somatics is to connect, to heal, to feel and be able to describe the internal experience to allow whatever needs to be completed in body to complete which is deeply healing for body and mind.
