How does Somatic Therapy Help with Trauma?
How somatic therapy can help us access feelings that have been buried under a traumatic experience.
3 min read | Illustration by Mayara Lista
In somatic therapy, we work together to heal trauma by bringing the sensory experience of that event into the room in a coherent and tolerable way. This allows us to slowly discharge emotional energy that was never accessed or released. It’s this experience of discharging the energy gradually, which allows the nervous system to reset and heal. This new internal experience can help support someone who has experienced trauma from continually becoming overwhelmed, or retriggered, in the face of day to day life stressors.
A traumatic experience changes our ability to feel our emotions fully. This happens because our bodies have a ‘collapse,’ ‘freeze’ and ‘shrinking’ response, which causes the emotion to get stuck in the body. The body’s efforts to contain this emotional energy often leads to states of intense activation or depression. These emotions can often be restored through a connection to self and the presence of a therapist as a healing agent.
When we experience a trauma we may experience a sense of unsafety in a particular place in the body, or in our entire body. In somatic therapies, like AEDP, the presence of a therapist plays an active role in helping a client feel the safety of the here and now to access feelings related to their traumatic event. Sarah Shuster, a therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy, shares that scanning the body helps clients “notice the places where they feel loose and comfortable, as well as the places where there is constriction and tightness.”
Awareness of somatic experiences help individuals who have a trauma history touch into even the smallest amount of survival energy and allow it to move through them in the context of a safe environment. Often these bodily sensations are cues; a roadmap guiding us to where and how we may have originally experienced a traumatic event.
“Bodily sensations are cues; a roadmap guiding us to where and how we may have originally experienced a traumatic event.”
One example from the founder of Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine, is the process of becoming comfortable with trembling. By noticing and allowing the sensation of trembling to enter the space, for just a few moments at a time, and then for a slightly longer period, and so on; a client will begin to experience progress. This act of noticing is intentionally the opposite of the glossing over or pushing feelings down of emotions in a traumatic event.
Another term coined by Peter Levine is pendulation. When a traumatized person begins to feel into a locked up emotion, it’s not uncommon for them to actually feel worse, initially. What’s happening is that by feeling into the contraction, it heightens the feelings. But, with a trained therapist, a client will be safely guided to feel these emotions to completion. This will accompany feeling sensations of widening and expanding.
Levine describes this as the basic rhythm of humans. With a skilled therapist, we’re safely pendulating between an ever-widening state of contraction and expansion. In other words, a client will feel heightened contraction and expansion. Over time, the client can safely tolerate these dual states, and eventually embrace the contraction, with increased levels of expansion which allow clients to feel joy in the aftermath of trauma.
Sarah Shuster, a therapist at downtown somatic therapy shares that she understands clients' reservations about somatic therapy which can feel intimate or intimidating. In response Shuster says, “when I work with a client who is hesitant about somatic therapy, I make sure to consistently check-in with the client - there is a lot of consent involved.” Shuster adds that, “often, my clients surprise themselves in sessions. It’s this very act of doing something different and feeling something new that is healing.” If you have been struggling to move past a traumatic experience, consider a consultation with a therapist skilled in somatic therapy at Downtown Somatic Therapy.