The essence of somatic therapy is an intentional shift: the intention to approach rather than avoid, experienced at the embodied (ie experiential) level (not just conceptual). Across the animal kingdom, we instinctively contract around a painful experience and hold ourselves away from it. While this instinct can be protective (ex: not putting weight on a hurt paw/foot to allow it to heal), it also holds things rigidly in place. When we are talking about it at the level of a felt sense of danger that is no longer happening, that is only a threat to us because at the level of the nervous system we are still responding as if it were still happening, we are keeping ourselves stuck in the very suffering that we want to heal. All the beliefs that were bound up in that experience/series of experiences put a filter over your view of the world to keep confirming the very wound you are trying to heal.
An example
For example, if you felt unseen as a child (and therefore unloved at the experiential level), your nervous system may have found safety by being conditioned to overgive. It will have become familiar for you to leave your own experience and attune more to somebody else’s experience, to disown your own needs and desires and your own voice . In present day, it may be hard for you to even know what you want, let alone speak what you want to another person. You may be in unsatisfying relationships where you feel unsupported and like you have to do it all yourself. Life will continue confirming this belief that you aren’t seen, or known or loved or that it’s not safe to be so. Just knowing logically that this isn’t true isn’t going to unwind this pattern. Your nervous system has to actually learn, at the experiential (aka somatic) level, that it is safe to be seen, to receive. To discern between the people who are capable of seeing you and those who aren’t. To be vulnerable enough to receive pleasure and to speak what you want.
Beginning the healing journey
When we begin to move towards these undigested experiences and these rigid patterns, rather than contracting around them and holding ourselves away from them, everything begins to shift. Whole realities transform around this. Somatic therapy puts a container of safety around the parts of yourself that you instinctively avoid so that it becomes safe enough to approach them. Your presence there (actually being there, not just observing from a distance), welcomes these parts back into your wholeness. As you do this, you begin to live more and more from your wholeness. Living as your wholeness, there’s a sense of spaciousness, of peace, of freedom.
Unwinding bound patterns and integrating unintegrated experiences
Being present, or moving towards these places that you instinctively avoid looks and feels very different from just observing them. But since it is not instinctive, it actually requires a volitional move towards these places. Somatic therapy–using various exercises or techniques depending on your needs and desires and depth of self-contact–is the volitional move towards these places. It is the experiential examining of rigid holding patterns experienced at all levels of our being (somatic, emotional, conceptual, etc) that keep us stuck in exactly the wound we are wanting to be free of. Our presence there allows something new to enter. Brainspotting,embodied meditation , and yoga all work at the somatic level and are techniques that facilitate this.
The gifts of this journey are many.
“Well, I’ve been down so very damn long that it looks like up to me.” Jim Morrison
