What the f is somatic healing

“Somatic healing” or “somatic therapy” may be terms that you have heard (likely, if you live in California), and they may not be. Somatic healing / therapy is really the frontier of the therapy world at the moment (btw, I consider California to be the geographic epicenter of the Western healing frontier; we are now in a second wave of what began to happen there in the 1960s – an integration of eastern, western, and shamanic healing principles and modalities).

Often, when we think of therapy in the west, we think of talk therapy. We think of sitting in a chair across from someone and explaining our childhood and our current struggles in life (be they addiction, depression severe or mild, our inability to find success at work or in relationship, or existential dread, or nagging dissatisfaction, or all of the above). We think of the therapist across from us deeply listening and helping us to connect the threads of the past to the present, showing us compassion and serving as a mirror for the things we are unwilling or unable to see. And this form of healing is a fairly recent development in the world. It was borne of Freud, who developed his theories about the way current behaviors are linked to past experience (what we now call trauma) and blended them with the techniques of hypnosis in the 20th century (to sum it up.. but yes, really). Freudian psychoanalysis is the foundation for all of talk therapy today; and while it has done a lot to help uncover trauma and ponder its origins, it doesn't tend to lead us into the healing of that trauma very quickly or efficiently. In straight talk therapy, we don't acknowledge the existence of the body from the neck down and what part it might have to play in our healing process.

“Somatic” comes from the greek work “soma," meaning “the body.” Simple as that: somatic healing has to do with healing based in the body. It weaves back into therapy the ancient knowing that our mind and spirit cannot be separated from our body. Another term for this is “holistic” - looking at and honoring the whole. What is special about the somatic healing modalities that have come about recently (starting in the 1970s, in the west) is that they are evolutions of talk therapy. They don't throw away the mind; the mind, as we know, is deeply important to the western world. Humans today want to understand things. So, these modalities look much like talk therapy in that they start with client and therapist, sitting across from each other, having a conversation. AND, the conversation takes a very deep turn inward - into the body and the knowing held there.

In my last email, I talked about trauma. I led with the example of birth trauma – an example of trauma that we can only understand somatically (in the body), because when we are born we do not yet know language. There is not yet language we can use to describe or understand that experience. As we get older, we develop language and the ability to comprehend things logically, in the brain. But often, in dealing with trauma (and in moments in which we are “triggered”), we revert to the versions of ourselves that we were at the age at which the trauma occurred: our inner 4-year old, or 7-year-old, or 15-year old. Depending on how verbal we were at each of these times, language and the mind can only go so far to explain, excavate, and mend the ruptures caused by trauma. Hence, the body.

When a non-human mammal, who does not have language, experiences trauma, it tends to go into an automatic response afterward where it shakes (kind of like a dog shaking after a bath or swim). The animal shakes and shakes until the energy of the trauma – all of the fear and adrenaline that are coursing though the body in such a moment - is released, until the body is back in homeostasis. Humans do not know to do this, and so the energy of trauma gets trapped in our bodies / nervous systems. This can happen in a sudden trauma, like a car accident or sudden injury. It can also happen in ongoing trauma that we experience - growing up with an abusive parent, being emotionally neglected in some way in childhood (if our parents need to, for some reason, pay more attention to a younger or chronically ill sibling, or if they have to work all of the time and leave us to our own devices).

There are countless forms of trauma that we can experience. And our bodies, in trauma-inducing moments, are responding in a very particular way to try to keep us safe (responses we nickname “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn”). Strangely, we often will subconsciously seek experiences in adulthood that resemble our original traumatic ones, because our bodies and nervous systems register those traumatized bodily states as “home.” A lot of times, the anxiety or depression or unease that we feel in our present lives are recreations of those same states from the past – we have found the perfect pawns to replace the original players from our childhood.

And so. How do we heal? How do we move beyond this and create lives of peace?

In somatic healing, we heal by dropping into the body, in the present. We sense what is going on - right here, right now. Often, this can require some invitations into and education around mindfulness, at first (many of us aren't taught how to be here, right now). From there, we explore: what is it like to be in your body, in this moment? Where is it, exactly, that you're feeling the anxiety you're describing (for example)? What is the exact texture of it? Is it moving? Is it in a relationship with a different feeling you're experiencing? Is there something that it is saying to you? Does it feel familiar?

From there, we begin to map the different parts that are present within our being: The feelings that might have voices, that might actually (we find out, a bit later in our work) be connected to those inner child parts that got hurt somewhere along the way. Maybe the anxiety is actually the part of us that is trying to protect them from getting hurt again. Or maybe it is the inner child itself, feeling scared. Once we can begin to see and validate what our inner parts are doing and saying, everything begins to shift. We can time travel to heal memories. We can bring comfort, protection, and attunement where we didn't, originally, get it.

I can only speak to my own journey of somatic therapy, here. It has changed my life, and still is. It has shown me where my scared inner children have been running the show. It has helped me to heal relational wounds I could not even see before, which has increased my capacity for love in my friendships and family tenfold. It has allowed me to look at the fear I feel in showing up authentically (here, for example), to hold the fear with love and gratitude, and to do it anyway.

What happens when we are able to become our own sacred mothers?