Somatic therapy channels the benefits of yoga, but you don’t have to work out
“Our issues are in our tissues.”
This adage often comes up in somatic therapy, a relatively new field that’s spiked in popularity in recent years.
The basic idea is that our bodies hold our traumas.
Whereas traditional talk therapy focuses on our stories, emotions and cognitive processing, somatic methods incorporate this physical element as well. Sessions involve a lot of checking in with the body, describing sensation and purposeful exercises to help the patient holistically process whatever comes up.
Here’s a crash course on how it works and how you can experience some of the benefits on your own, courtesy of Ashlie Brown, a licensed professional counselor and Somatic Experiencing practitioner who’s seen such an uptick in demand for this kind of “bottom up” therapy. Her Houston practice is full and has a waitlist.
1. A lot of us don’t know how to process our stress, so it never really goes away.
Somatic Experiencing, the therapeutic method that Brown practices, focuses on regulating the nervous system.
Our natural response to stress is “fight or flight.” Think of how a caveman would respond to seeing a tiger: Run or stay and do battle.
This impulse is helpful. It’s characterized by being hyper-alert and ready for action (pupils dilate, muscles tense, blood pressure and heart rate go up). It’s a survival instinct.
But in modern life, we mostly don’t need to run or fight in response to stress.
That’s great. But paired with the fact that we often lack the broader mental and emotional skills to effectively handle stress, it means the fight-or-flight energy is never fully processed and released.
The result: We tend to live in a space of elevated stress, chronically dwelling in that fight-or-flight zone, until we crash in the opposite direction. At that end of the spectrum is the “freeze” zone, where instead of being super on, we’re low, flat, exhausted — some version of depressed.
2. Pay attention to what’s happening in your body as the first step toward regulating your nervous system and feeling more balanced.
Instead of being at the mercy of our programmed responses to stress, it’s possible to notice what’s happening and regulate ourselves, Brown says.
“Check in with how your body is feeling,” she says. “Is there tightness anywhere? Does it feel tired? How does your breathing feel? Your heart rate?”
Brown’s sessions involve a lot of such questions, and she suggests we all do this frequently at home.
“If you were to rate how your body feels on a scale from 0-10 … 0 being the worst and 10 being the best, where are you?”
“Anything under a 5 is keeping you in the fight/flight zone and over time will wear your nervous system down … and eventually will result in the body feeling overwhelmed and going into a chronic freeze response (depression).”
She says paying more attention to how we physically feel, with brief check-ins throughout the day, can help us notice when we’re off track and needing to “resource.”
3. Resourcing: anything that can help your mind/body settle.
Brown says a resource is “anything you can utilize in the moment you’re dysregulated.”
In other words, when you catch yourself feeling physically tense, breathing quickly or generally stressed, it’s time to take some action that’s calming.
This will look different for everyone. It could involve calling a certain memory to mind, grounding — feeling your physical connection to something solid beneath you — breathing deeply or taking a bath. It could involve an exercise, such as ringing out a dish towel for 1-2 seconds a few times. Another therapist I’ve worked with recommends punching a pillow or mattress to work out thwarted energy from fight mode.
There are a lot of options, but the key is checking back in with your body in each one. None of this is meant to be purely cognitive. The felt-sense of settling and releasing is essential.
As I’ve been dabbling with this lately, I’ve found tracking sensations (even in the heat of the moment) to be an interesting and helpful resource.
As a yoga teacher and practitioner, I’m all in on the belief that more consciously inhabiting our bodies is a pathway to feeling more balanced and present. Somatic therapy feels like an extension of that. It invites us to tune in to our physiology, put into words what comes up, and holistically discover a sense of center.
I hope this helps you feel that, and more.
