Somatic Therapy

Somatic therapy is a body-oriented approach to addressing the feedback loops that continually run between the mind-body. It can also address the negative imprints that trauma can leave locked inside the body. During sessions, client’s are slowly and incrementally guided toward exploring their inner world through observing internal sensations, rather than cognitive or emotional experiences. Through the use of various somatic modalities, clients will be able to potentially renegotiate trauma-related stress responses through body-based processing.

Somatic Therapy is an alternative therapy for treating trauma and stress related disorders like PTSD. The primary goal of somatic therapy is to modify the trauma-related stress response through bottom-up processing. The clients’ attention is directed toward internal sensations (interoception, proprioception and kinesthetic awareness), rather than to cognitive experiences.

These sessions can help a client learn how to attend to uncomfortable sensations their body and gently unwind them through conscious attention. Somatic therapy is particularly useful in managing the stress related to trauma as many of the symptoms are physiological.

Somatic Therapy:

• Employs awareness of body sensation to help people "renegotiate" and heal rather than re-live or re-enact trauma.

• Works directly with the science of arousal states within the autonomic nervous system.

• Observes the guidance of the bodily "felt sense," allows the highly survival energies to be safely experienced and gradually discharged.

• “Titrates” experience (breaks down into small, incremental steps), rather than evoking catharsis, which can overwhelm the regulatory nature of the autonomic nervous system.