Working with the body can be an important, yet all too often neglected, aspect of psychotherapy. We usually think of psychotherapy as a means of processing and integrating our thoughts and emotions, most often in the context of our relationships with others and our environment. Many of us might not realize how much of the physically embodied dimension of our lives–which includes perception, sensation, and movement– is directly related to how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us. Both Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Somatic Experiencing offer us a way of accessing and processing issues through the body, while integrating our somatic (body) experiences with cognitive and emotional processing. Working across the mind-body interface can often be more effective than working with thoughts and feelings alone.
Nowhere else is this more true that in the processing of trauma. In trauma, we perceive that our life is threatened. This degree of threat affects us in our nervous system, musculature, hormones, and brain, in addition to our psyche. In the face of trauma, our capacity to calmly think through a life-threatening situation fades into the background, while our fight/flight/freeze responses quickly jump into the foreground. We can easily feel out of control of our actions, as a more primitive physical intelligence takes over in the service of survival. When these bodily survival responses do not fully complete themselves (as frequently happens in humans due to our complex thinking habits), they can become fixed in the nervous system, leading to PTSD symptoms. Physical symptoms such as hyper-arousal, hypo-arousal, constriction, and numbing, can become coupled with psychological issues of dissociation, feeling helpless, anxious, depressed, isolated, and out of control.
In these two therapies, we work directly with these reactions in the body in a safe and contained way. By helping to facilitate complete processing of the physical reactions to trauma, survivors can experience a marked reduction of PTSD symptoms. We allow this processing to occur through the cultivation of mindful awareness, the close tracking of gross and subtle body sensations and movement impulses, facilitating their own organic expression and pathways through the body. The experience might be likened to a very slowed down sequence of waves in the ocean; each one progressively gaining momentum, rising, cresting, then falling away, receding back into the ocean of one’s body.
Equally important is the strengthening of somatic resources. When we have resources, we are able to experience a buffer between ourselves and the harshness of our environment. When we feel strong, comfortable, confident, and at peace in our bodies, we are likely to feel strong, comfortable, confident, and peaceful in our minds. A body-oriented therapist utilizes somatic resourcing exercises such as appropriate boundary setting, reaching out, centering, and grounding, all of which create an important foundation in helping a person tolerate the actual processing of trauma.
Using Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, we find that providing new and supportive experiences in the body can also lead to more effective processing and integration of deeply held emotions and cognitive beliefs. Our goals include reduction of symptoms, decrease in overall distress, ability to feel in control of one’s life, increase in comfort and pleasure, capacity for satisfying relationships with others, and capacity for fullness of meaning– including meaning around the trauma itself.
Call 415/453-1403 or email kate@kebrennan.com to schedule a 20 minute consultation at no charge.
