Beyond Nervous System Hacks: What Somatic Therapy Actually Does
Somatic has now become a buzzword. But I’m not mad about it, minus the fact that everyone is trying to biohack with all the nervous system tricks.
If I go beyond the illusion of these hacks, I get excited about how we are integrating body-based therapies into the field of psychology.
For me, it’s imperative that we involve body-based therapies when supporting clients.
Because what’s in the brain is in the body, and what is in the body is in the brain.
Every single client of mine has, at one point, said something along the lines of: “I’ve tried every kind of therapy, and I understand all the reasons why I have trauma, why I respond the way I do. Heck, I’m even doing all the coping strategies that I’ve learned, and NOTHING is changing long term.”
This is often because we aren’t taking into consideration the client’s physiology. We are not just a brain; we are multiple nervous systems, organs, tissues, cells, mind, and spirit. So why would we not integrate the body experience? I often have clients sharing with me their perceptions, but my first curiosity is often how it shows up in their bodies. What story does the body want to tell?
We often figure out, after a big moment or a lifetime of overwhelming experiences, that constriction is a great strategy to navigate life. When this pattern is repeated out of necessity, your body begins to associate constriction with familiarity, security, and comfort. Sometimes, without knowing it, we seek people, environments, jobs, and ways of being that create more constriction, thus reinforcing the pattern.
Trauma occurs when we experience a threat that overwhelms our nervous system; we often do not have enough time to process what is happening, and our nervous system responds automatically with a survival protection response (fight, flight, or freeze). Through Somatic Experiencing® work, we support the nervous system to have more capacity to stay in the present and experience everyday emotions and sensations. We also support the nervous system in moving through stuck survival protection responses, so we are no longer stuck responding in the present as we had to in the past.
Somatic, which derives from the Greek word soma, means body. I often see a big discrepancy between what my clients think cognitively and how their bodies respond. Here’s a common example: “I’m fine, I’m fine,” but my whole body is bracing, my jaw is clenching, and my heart is racing.
When we slow things down, go at a pace that is respectful of your physiology, and dip in and dip out, the tortoise wins the race. Slower is faster when it comes to trauma healing.
I can appreciate that, as humans, we want instant results and instant relief. However, when we put into perspective how you’ve potentially engrained these adaptive strategies for years, sometimes decades, it isn’t realistic for change to be instant. A big part of the way I work, what I often call mapping out the terrain, is understanding the ways you have figured out how to navigate the world. What does that look like sequentially, and then can we create okay-enough conditions to support change?
I think of it this way: you’ve brilliantly organized in particular ways. I want to support incremental disorganization that you can manage, which builds self-trust that you can be with all of your experience. This inevitably allows opportunities for your system to reorganize and respond differently.
One thing I wish people knew about somatic therapy is that this is often long-term work. Our brains learn far better by experiencing things than by conceptualizing them. However, amazingly, when we create the conditions in our physiology and our brains to support healing, it can happen quicker than we might anticipate.
Moving beyond talk therapy and really integrating the body and the nervous system, we quickly recognize that:
The nervous system does not heal in a linear way. It doesn’t respond well to being pushed, analyzed, or interpreted. Instead, it reorganizes through subcortical processes that happen outside conscious awareness.
Much of what the nervous system holds was never encoded in language.
Healing does not depend on insight. It depends on allowing the nervous system to complete what was interrupted.
Curiosity leads the way, curiosity allows for expansion, and remembering that curiosity cannot be present at the same time as fear.
