Somatic therapy involves finding the intersection of the body and mind to treat trauma and other mental health conditions in a holistic way. Somatic literally means “relating to the body,” so in somatic therapy, the aim is to bring in the physical lens that often gets cast aside in favor of focusing exclusively on our cognitive experience. While there is undeniably utility in understanding our experiences intellectually to gain deeper insight, oftentimes we reach a bypass with unresolved emotions that get stuck in the body. Enter somatic therapy.
You may have heard your therapist ask you, “where do you feel this in your body?” This can be a frustrating question if you haven’t considered body sensations in relation to depression, anxiety, or other challenging conditions before. This question is an invitation for you to begin to tune into and track your body sensations in relation to your cognitive experiences more closely. The goal is to create a blueprint of the bi-directional relationship between your emotions and your bodily state. When you notice that your shoulders are scrunched up to your ears, what thoughts are going through your head? They’re likely not calming ones. Inversely, when you notice racing thoughts in your mind, what’s happening in your body? Is your jaw clenched? Tongue at the roof of your mouth? Is there tightness or heaviness in your upper back or shoulders? Cultivating awareness in both directions allows you to make a conscious shift to alter your mental or physical experience. If you notice a tensing in your shoulders, for example, and you take a beat to relax them, notice what this does for your mind. This describes a bottom-up approach to changing your thought patterns - changing your bodily state to alter your mind state - rather than a top-down approach - changing your thoughts to change your bodily experience - which is utilized in traditional talk therapy like CBT.
Different types of somatic therapy
EMDR & brainspotting
So, what are some examples of somatic therapy? One you’ve likely heard of is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which is a form of somatic therapy primarily used to treat trauma. EMDR is an eight-phase modality that involves identifying and targeting a traumatic memory, learning to resource yourself throughout the process of re-experiencing the trauma, and processing negative beliefs and associated body sensations related to the identified trauma. The goal of EMDR is to heal the unresolved symptoms of trauma, utilizing both the power of the body and the mind. Brainspotting is an offshoot of EMDR that focuses on really digging into one “stuck” point in the processing of the trauma, and allows you to go deeper than you may in EMDR. An additional benefit of brainspotting is that, unlike EMDR, the client is not required to re-experience the identified trauma.
Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy
Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) is a form of psychotherapy that utilizes in-the-moment experiences between the client and counselor to foster a deeper sense of bodily awareness and how this relates to our mental experience. In this modality, the counselor may make observations about ways they notice that the client presents physically when they are describing an emotion or experience - this practice is called immediacy. AEDP also draws heavily on attachment theory, and examines how early relational attachments inform current coping patterns and emotional regulation. Another type of somatic therapy, Gestalt therapy, is similar to AEDP in that it draws on the present moment and the bodily experiences happening in the room.
There are so many other forms of effective somatic therapy, and it’s well worth it to try out different styles to find the one that feels most supportive of your goals. If you’re interested in getting support in exploring trauma or unresolved emotions through a body + mind lens, reach out to one of our clinicians today.
References:
What is somatic therapy? By Harvard Health Publishing
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