Somatic therapy, also referred to as body psychology, is a therapeutic approach that explores how the body expresses unprocessed trauma and emotions, while improving the connection between a person’s body and mind. As a person experiences trauma, it gets stored on a cellular level. With the help of a somatic therapist, an individual develops awareness of their bodily sensations, releasing certain emotions built up within the body. If you or a loved one is dealing with trauma, here’s how somatic therapy can benefit you.
1. Improve Bodily Awareness
While traditional talk therapy can help individuals manage mental and emotional issues, somatic therapy targets deep-seated trauma stored in your nervous system. Somatic therapy for trauma helps cultivate the awareness of your bodily sensations, enabling you to feel safe in your body while exploring memories, thoughts, and emotions. With this technique, you are able to recognize tension within the body and evoke calming thoughts.
2. Release Trauma
Somatic therapy helps people suffering from PTSD reconnect with their bodies. For those who have experienced physical trauma, such as sexual violence or domestic abuse, it can be difficult to get rid of that trauma and lead a normal life. One of the principles that somatic therapy works on is that trauma is stored in the body.
This therapy helps bring awareness to how one’s body responds to triggers and trauma and focuses on how thoughts and reactions can affect it. Properly executed somatic therapy lets an individual release the deep-seated trauma through mindful exercises as it makes the person aware of where trauma is stored in their body.
3. Find the Tools to Improve Your Overall Health
Trauma often holds us back from living our lives to the fullest. With somatic therapy, you can discover the necessary tools to improve your mental health. It even helps you get rid of the emotional, mental, and physical blocks that keep you from living full and happy lives.
While somatic therapy enables us to recognize how our body feels and where the unprocessed trauma lies, it also helps us discover the tools to process and deal with those emotions. You can use somatic exercises, such as resourcing and grounding, whenever you need to soothe yourself after encountering a trigger.
4. Reduce Tension
Somatic therapy also teaches you how to release the tension stored in your body due to trauma. You can bring awareness to the body using mindful somatic techniques and learn how to locate tense or painful areas in your body. Generally, a person with past trauma often experiences tension within the body as they deal with emotional dysregulation.
This is the result of the freeze response, which is an alternative to the “fight or flight” response. As the name suggests, the person freezes when they feel threatened. This occurs as the brain cannot ascertain that they are no longer in danger. As a result, it exhibits the freeze response, which causes symptoms like confusion, difficulty moving, and detachment.
Somatic therapy and exercises can help you effectively treat the trapped trauma. The treatment focuses on resetting and reconditioning the nervous system so that it starts to believe that there is no threat.
5. Treat the Symptoms
Apart from helping people suffering from PTSD, somatic therapy can be used to treat several common conditions, such as anxiety, chronic pain, depression, and substance use disorders (SUDs). Since the therapy improves a person’s bodily sensations and helps them regulate the emotional system, it can teach people about better thinking patterns and create a productive balance by rewiring the brain.
With this therapy, people start developing a greater awareness of their internal experiences, including emotions and sensations. It teaches various techniques to help people better understand how their body processes trauma and how they can process and release it.
The Power of Somatic Therapy for Mental Health
Somatic therapy has multiple proven benefits for those struggling with mental health conditions like depression, PTSD, and anxiety. It helps individuals to bring awareness back to their body and recondition it to release the unprocessed trauma and emotions stored deep within the nervous system, improving several symptoms of mental disorders in the process. If you are seeking somatic therapy for yourself or a loved one, consider getting it from a licensed professional.
