Three Reasons Somatic Therapy Works To Heal Trauma
Somatic Therapy San Francisco
If you are looking for therapy to help you heal from psychological trauma, you may think all therapies are equally effective. That, however, is not the case. Often with traditional talk therapy, people talk and talk about the harmful events they have experienced without ever coming to any kind of resolution. They turn the event over and over in their minds, examining every detail and ruminating like the next detail they remember will be what causes the pain to disappear. It doesn’t work that way. Fortunately, other therapy modalities are available that have been shown to help alleviate trauma. In particular various somatic therapies, or therapies that incorporate the body to help heal the mind, are useful in treating those healing from psychological trauma.
It makes sense to use somatic therapies because, as Amber Gray, a dance therapist who has worked in Haiti with trauma survivors, succinctly states:
“The upset or discord that being traumatized creates can become an imbalance, or loss of agency, and/or loss of core rhythmicity, which can only truly be restored with interventions or treatments that address, include, and engage the body.” (Gray, 155).
The following are three additional reasons that somatic therapy is especially effective at working with trauma.
Three Reasons Somatic Therapy Works With Trauma
1) The Memory of Trauma Often Stores in the Body.
Since traumatic memories often store in the body, this is often why when a person feels certain physical sensations, e.g. a specific touch, etc., a flashback to the trauma can be triggered without a person explicitly thinking of what happened to them. These traumatic memories are called implicit memories and can be accompanied by strong feelings as well as fragments of the the traumatic memory that occur in flashbacks.
2) Somatic Therapy Helps Restore A Sense Of Safety For Survivors.
One of the main effects of trauma is that the survivor feels unsafe in their body. They are bombarded with uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, and sensations that are difficult to feel. Merely talking may relieve some of the pressure from these memories and emotions, yet, it is not enough. Through various somatic techniques, somatic therapy can help a client feel safe and that their body is no longer the enemy.
3) Somatic Therapy Can Also Help A Client Reconnect With Their Body
Often, after feeling so many physical sensations that seem uncontrollable for a long period of time, trauma survivors can become numb to what they feel in their bodies. It simply becomes too scary to feel everything that resulted from the trauma they endured. The result is that many survivors ignore those pesky physical sensations which can lead to a disconnect between their gut feelings and thinking brain. Ignoring physical sensations is problematic because survivors may not realize when they are in a dangerous situation, thus putting them at risk for more psychological trauma.
These are a few of the important reasons somatic therapy can help trauma survivors heal. As always, though somatic therapy can be helpful in healing trauma, it is important to consider what somatic therapy you are using and how skilled the practitioner is in working with trauma. Dance therapy is particularly helpful because of the movement observation skills of the therapist and the movement interventions provided to the client. Other somatic therapy methods may offer other benefits.
If you would like to learn more ways that somatic therapy might benefit you or if you have any questions about somatic therapy, dance therapy, or trauma, please feel free to contact me at lisa@lisamanca.com. Hope to hear from you soon!
Reference:
Gray, A. (2016). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. American Journal of Dance Therapy, 38(1), 151–156. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10465-016-9214-4