Somatic therapy is not without its critics, however, the latest advances in neuroscience support many of its principles. Being aware of our somatic experiences can help us heal trauma and trapped emotions.
Somatic therapy helps us to understand and promote a correct harmony between body, mind, and emotions. It’s a holistic approach that makes use of colorful remedial strategies. Therefore, its purpose is to help us come apprehensive of colorful physical gests, those associated with traumatic events or wedged feelings.
Sometimes we miss that intimate conjunction between mind, body, and emotions. Dr. Bruce Perry, director of the Children’s Mental Health Hospital of Alberta, Canada, documented a notable fact that should make us reflect.
This psychiatrist, also a specialist in behavioral pediatrics, noticed a positive and curious aspect.
Somatic therapy and children
All the children who were labeled as very nervous by their teachers, with bad behavior, and performing poorly in class, showed enormous progress by engaging in a range of physical activities shortly before entering the classroom. After these exercises, they became more relaxed and academically focused, to the point of notably improving in the literary and mathematical process.
The truth is, we still don’t fully understand this special link between the body, our emotions, and even our cognitive performance. One of the most relevant figures in this field is Antonio Damásio. Thus, one of his best-known theories is undoubtedly that of the somatic marker.
This term defines how emotions create somesthetic sensations, which are a type of physiological pattern capable of mediating our decision-making and reasoning processes.
It is an exciting subject that has also incorporated approaches such as somatic therapy in its foundations. Let’s see more data below.
“Heartstrings are more dangerous than ideas because they are not susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow still, spreading underground, and suddenly, they explode far and wide. ”
-Brian Eno-
Goals of somatic therapy:
In somatic therapy, practitioners mostly use a psychobiological approach to treat trauma. This approach assumes that the body and mind are not treated as a unit.
It is practically impossible to facilitate complete healing of the person.
This technique was developed by Professor Standley Keleman, from Berkeley, in 1971. Its ideal was to “heal the physical, emotional, and cerebral knots deduced from conflicts, gests, and undetermined gests”.
Similarly, practitioners effectively apply it to problems such as anxiety, stress, depression, and addictions.
And even to favor a better quality of life for people with chronic pain. If we now ask about the effectiveness of somatic therapy, we can say that we have a lot of scientific documentation.
Studies conducted by the University of Jerusalem and the Los Angeles Trauma Institute. Explain that somatic therapy is a useful strategy in the treatment of post-traumatic stress. Patients who experienced childhood abuse, as well as people who were involved in events related to natural catastrophes, have made good progress, according to observers.
Psychobiological approach
We are facing a type of psychobiological approach that integrates body awareness into the psychotherapeutic process.
- It is based on the idea that every trauma, complex event, problem, or concern has an impact on the autonomic nervous system.
- These complex emotions, far from dissolving over time, become somatized in our organism. And they do it in the form of digestive problems, hormonal imbalances, the immune system, muscle aches, headaches, and allergies.…
- The therapist’s goal is to facilitate homeostasis. That is, to achieve this there is a harmony between mind and body. In which nothing hurts, and nothing obscures our ability to develop in the present without the weight of the past.
- During somatic therapy sessions, practitioners provide patients with tools to help them detect all the sensations that occur in their bodies.
- Furthermore, somatic therapy differs from cognitive therapy in that the intervention moves from the body to the mind.
Discovering and Understanding
Discovering and understanding these internal sensations, both visceral (interoception) and musculoskeletal (proprioception and kinesthetic) allows the therapist to go further into emotional realities.
It is also worth mentioning that, in recent years, somatic therapy is finding greater scientific support thanks to advances in neuroscience. Studies like that of Dr. Lauri Nummenmaa, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Aalto University in Finland, are among the most striking and revealing.
This work was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Researchers presented the first body map of human emotions.
Internal realities such as anger, fear, disappointment, surprise, or envy showed greater physiological activity in a certain area of our body.
How to release and understand emotions trapped in our body
The Doctor. Peter Levine, the physician biophysicist, and psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley are one of the exponents of the so-called somatic experiencing therapy. His approach to mediating this emotional release is to be able to “get” it out of our body first. Initiating changes requires us to be aware of the pathological marks contained in our organisms.
Initiating changes
The means to achieve this are as follows:
- Relaxation and deep breathing techniques.
- Physical exercises such as dances, movements, stretching, etc.
- Voice exercises.
Each person will work more with one type of fashion or another. Still, the thing is for the person to come apprehensive of physical tests. Each sensation should evoke images and emotions, those that will help the therapist to understand what is happening.
In conclusion, we should note that critics exist for this type of therapy.
The main one is that many people make the mistake of adopting this strategy without first having a clear diagnosis. It is always necessary to rule out organic problems, diseases, and hormonal changes, such as thyroid problems.
Somatic therapy, although useful and interesting. Does not have the effectiveness rate of others with greater relevance, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. However, we cannot ignore its growth nowadays.
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