What is Somatic Therapy & How Does it Work?

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Many of us have heard of somatic therapy but may not actually understand what it is or how it works. Or we may have heard of it and thought it sounded kind of weird or "woo-woo”. Although it may seem strange in practice, it is grounded in sound neuroscience.

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Let’s start with the basics. The word “somatic” originates from the Greek word soma, meaning body. Our somatic body is our physical body, not our emotions, cognitions, or behaviours, which many other counselling modalities focus on. Somatic therapy works with the whole nervous system throughout the body, not just the brain. This approach can help create lasting and impactful change in the nervous system.

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Somatic Therapy and Attachment Theory

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Some somatic therapists incorporate attachment theory into their work. There is an acknowledgement of the fundamental connection between our ability to securely attach to others and our ability to regulate our nervous system and emotions. Although our needs may vary from person to person, we all need connection. This begins the day we are born.

 

As infants, our survival depends on connection. If our caregivers are able to adequately attune to us, to understand our non-verbal cues, and respond appropriately to our biological, psychological, and social needs, we are much more likely to feel comforted and to thrive. These early caregiver experiences shape our nervous systems and thus how well we recover from stress, our beliefs about how safe we are in the world and in relationships, and how able we are to be soothed by ourselves and others.

 

Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy acknowledges the essential need for healthy social connection and provides support to address early attachment wounds and nervous system dysregulation. It helps resolve and heal old coping strategies that we relied on at one point in life, but that keep us stressed, socially isolated, and from reaching our full potential.

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Where Attachment Can Go Wrong

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If our needs are not understood or adequately attended to, we may internalize this as our fault and have our first experiences of shame, prolonged dysregulation, disconnection, and feeling deeply alone. We may be left with a lingering sense that we are: too much, not enough, not lovable, not inherently worthy of success, love, and connection and with a chronically dysregulated nervous system that is hypervigilant and quick to respond to stress, and slow, or unable to recover.

 

These early experiences can have lasting impacts on our ability to connect with others and self-regulate. This means our ability to calm ourselves or receive emotional support after an event that has launched us into a survival response of fight, flight, or freeze. One study done with high school students in Japan showed that youth who have three or less close confidants have statistically much higher levels of anxiety and depression than their more well-connected peers (Nishida et al., 2024). This metric could well apply to all of us, regardless of age. Having three or more close confidants whom we can confide in and who can provide non-judgmental, loving support can help us recover from stress and can significantly increase our well-being in all areas of life.

 

Stockpiling Tension and Stress

 

Picture this....

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You're driving down the highway, and a car makes a sudden and unexpected turn in front of you. You need to be able to respond immediately and automatically to prevent a crash.

 

Then picture driving away from this scene. Are you able to immediately shake off that experience and go on with your day, or do you hold onto that tension? Maybe storing it as tension in your jaw, neck, or shoulders, holding the same defensive pose that may have been necessary to respond in the moment, but which is no longer needed once you arrive at your destination. After this near miss, you arrive home or to work and have an unpleasant exchange with your manager or spouse. You go into that interaction still braced for fight, flight or freeze. Perhaps the conflict escalates because you entered it in an already defended state, rather than being open and curious. At the end of that day you go to bed, can’t get comfortable because you are still holding all that tension you never fully let go of or recovered from. You toss and turn, wake up not well rested, rinse and repeat. Many of us go through life this way, stockpiling unprocessed stress, tension and emotions.

 

For some of us, it may eventually lead to physical health concerns, dopamine-seeking addictive behaviours, interpersonal conflict, mood issues, anxiety, depression and so on. At this point, we might be reflecting and trying to find the origin and solutions. We are thinking that compared to a lot of people, our life is not really that bad. We may not be able to identify any significant traumas, yet we feel chronically stressed, in conflict, easily triggered, on edge and struggling with our sleep and mood.

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...So What Now?

 

If you are a pet owner, you may have witnessed your dog encounter a stressful situation and almost immediately shake it off...literally. As humans, we have been socialized to disconnect with this innate knowing of how to destress effectively. These behaviours might not be good for relationships, but would be very helpful for offloading stress from our nervous systems. Imagine in the near miss situation on the highway, if instead of continuing on with your day in a gripped-ready-for-anything threat pose, you instead found the nearest pull off and did a full body shake. You might get some weird looks, and you might also not carry this nervous system charge with you into your work, relationships, sleep etc.

 

Where Somatic Attachment Therapy Comes In and How it Works

 

Somatic therapy helps clients to first learn to connect to their bodies. Our stress responses are a full-body experience. Your heart rate may increase to provide vital circulation for life saving measures, your breathing may get shallow, digestion slows, as a result you may feel nauseous or need to use the bathroom, you might feel lightheaded, tingly, mentally flooded or disassociated. These are all the physical manifestations of our body going into a survival response in case we are in life-threatening danger. This is very helpful if we are in fact in danger, but it is less helpful if it happens too often, perhaps in a conversation with a loved one or in response to small daily stressors.

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What Somatic Therapy Might Look Like

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• The counsellor may guide you to notice and track these physiological stress responses, so you are better able to identify when they begin and intervene earlier, so they are activated less often and less intensely, and so you recover quicker, lessening the impact on your body, mind, and relationships.

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• Once you have a strong sense of where your nervous system is at and how to better resource and regulate yourself, the counsellor may guide you to slowly dip in and explore topics that create some degree of nervous system arousal, allowing you to adequately process and let go of chronic tension and more appropriately respond to future stress.

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• A counsellor will work with you on grounding and resourcing, which means accessing people, places, and things in your life that bring a strong sense of calm. These can be brought into awareness as regulation tools to support you while processing stressful or even traumatic events in your life, helping you build resilience, awareness, and tools to offload stress at the source rather than carrying it with you into all aspects of your life.

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• A counsellor will teach you how to use body-based techniques to bring your body back into a state of regulation. All of this will be done in the context of a safe, caring, attuned and well-regulated counsellor helping to provide a corrective experience to those early attachment and attunement wounds, and helping to address and let go of the copying strategies you have employed to adapt to a less than favourable early social environment and a chronically dysregulated nervous system.

 

Interest in learning more?

 

Book a somatic session today or read more about it from the work of Lisa Mortimore and Stacy Jensen, who have trained a number of our therapists with (https://bringingthebody.ca/) and Peter Lavine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing Therapy (https://www.somaticexperiencing.com/about-peter) 

 

Peter Lavine has dedicated his life's work to studying this and is the forefounder of most modern somatic therapy.

 

Reference

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Nishida, A., Foo, J. C., Yamaguchi, S., Togo, F., Shimodera, S., Nishida, A., Okazaki, Y., & Sasaki, T. (2024). Association between number of confidants and adolescent anxiety/depression: a school-based study. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13034-024-00778-0

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