Somatic Therapy and Trauma Healing: Coming Home to the Body

At the heart of somatic therapy lies the intention to come home to ourselves in all of our aliveness. To establish pathways of connecting with our inner world and the many and rich inner landscapes of feeling, sensation, impulse and intuition, integrated with thought and cognition. When we find tools to listen and relate inwardly in this way, we are rewiring our nervous system to be able to have choice rather than being stuck in repeating loops and modes of survival. Nothing gets severed or left behind in this process though, and we can come to hold even these protective patterns with kindness and understanding.

We are living in a time and culture in which we are often cut off from the wisdom of our embodied aliveness. The body ends up being the vessel for the unconscious material that we are unable to hold. We learn to ‘swallow our tears’, ‘pull ourselves together’, ‘get a grip’. We develop an array of high functioning inner managers, all orchestrated around not feeling our pain or becoming overwhelmed. But we do not get to be selective about what we quieten inside, and in the process of numbing our pain we may find we have also numbed our joy and our very aliveness.

When it comes to working with trauma this disconnect is even more prevalent. Peter Levine describes how trauma is not necessarily what happens to us, but what we are left holding in the absence of a compassionate witness. The painful experiences that we were unable to attend to in ourselves becomes the material that we are left holding at the level of soma. This can be an event or shock trauma, but it can also be the relational wounds where we were unseen or unmet in the way we needed by our caregivers.

Experiences, just like food, require metabolising or processing. But if we do not have the capacity, or enough safety at the time, our system has the intelligence to ‘hold’ these unprocessed experiences in a protective and deeply compassionate fashion, in order to survive. There is a wisdom and deep kindness in keeping us protected from experiences that our system fears could overwhelm us. While we may not remember such painful experiences, we are often we are left feeling them, as unexplained physical symptoms, chronic conditions or nervous system states stuck in cycles of fight/flight, dissociation or deep shut down. All of these experiences can be understood as ‘body memories’. As Janina Fisher aptly names, “your body remembers what your brain had to forget". 

Reframing our experience in this way allows us to begin to come into a relationship with our inner world, to listen, bring curiosity, and to relate to our embodied experience as communication rather than symptoms. I have found that this shift in how we relate to ourselves is often the beginning of change. Our system feels when it is being listened to with care and understanding, as opposed to being made wrong or a problem to fix.

Many clients who come to explore somatic therapy have years of talking therapy behind them, which has often supported them greatly in understanding themselves and their history. But people often name that they are still living with the imprints of trauma and struggling to create actual change. Many mistakenly believe that they need to unearth or re-experience traumatic material, but thankfully this is not the case. Instead we want to create a holding field of safety and resource that allows the system to metabolise the ‘charge’ that the body is left holding. This happens gently and naturally, guided by the intelligence of the body.

As we bring presence to long quiet or shut down places inside, our life force energy can return. This might include the bumpy ride of beginning to feel more, and perhaps encountering feelings we long ago pushed away. In somatic therapy we create a safe container and draw on resources and layers of support to be able to do this at the pace of trust and safety. We can use nervous system tracking as a tool to be able to notice:

“What am I feeling at this moment in time?”

“How do I know if something feels ‘too much or too fast?”

“What does safety feel like?”

As we develop this ability to listen inwardly we are developing ‘neuroception for safety’ -  the ability to orient to a felt sense of ease, safety and belonging. The ability to sense safety is marked by the capacity to rest into an embodied and relational state, ie, I can feel myself and I can feel another. I can be in connection both inwardly and outwardly. Developing ‘neuroception for safety’ can support a major shift inside and allow for the gentle processing of inner held material. Such processes requires staying in that window of belonging, learning to take pauses, to listen, to slow, and ultimately to widen our capacity to feel. In this way our body can become a wise inner guide that we work with, not against, and we can begin to open to states of pleasure and connection that may not have previously been possible.

“When the unlived life is not expressed, it does not disappear.

It speaks through the body - tightness in the throat, restlessness in the belly,

an empty ache in the heart.

These are not errors or pathologies.

They are poems of the soul, encoded in the flesh.

Sacred signals of what longs to be held in love.”

~ Matt Licata