Unlocking Wellness With Somatic Therapy: Benefits for Mind and Body

Somatic therapy, which is often called somatic experiencing, includes the body, mind, and spirit in therapeutic healing. It utilizes an approach that focuses on the body to reconnect both the body and the mind to treat several conditions relating to mental health.

You may be hesitant to go to therapy as a result of the fact that you do not wish to discuss your problems. You may have even attempted cognitive behavioral talk therapy and realized it is triggering and not helpful.

However, somatic therapy incorporates the elements of healing associated with talk therapy with the awareness of body sensations. It is usually carried out in a way that you get sensation awareness in your body, thereby minimizing certain symptoms while you handle previous wounds.

Interestingly, sometimes, therapeutic contact is adopted in somatic therapy, and it has been found to be of benefit to those who deal with trauma. Let us now look into how you can achieve wellness with somatic therapy.

What Is Somatic Therapy?

Somatic therapy is a step to psychotherapy that focuses on the mind-body connection. Somatic therapists are known to incorporate talk therapy with other means of physical therapy. It is an approach that is body-centric and targets the release of how the body holds on to tension, trauma, and stress.

Several types of somatic therapy blend The mind-body connection, which may include the encouragement of patients to build improved awareness of their sensations and bodies, calming themselves, and understanding emotional release. Certain exercises such as yoga and dance can be regarded to be somatic experiences. The major thing is to concentrate on your inner experience as you go on and widen your awareness internally.

Types of Somatic Therapy 

There are various types of somatic experiential therapy with little variations. Professionals sometimes integrate massage, eye positioning, or breathwork into sessions to help their patients on the journey of their healing. Having said that, experiential therapies include:

• Art Therapy 
• Brainspotting
• Motivational interviewing 
• Yoga Therapy 
• Art Therapy
• Psychodrama
• Equine Therapy 

Techniques of Somatic Therapy

Somatic therapy focuses on introducing awareness to the mind and body. While traditional talk therapy can enable people to work on emotional and mental problems, somatic therapy can aim at deep-seated trauma in the nervous system. The following are some of the approaches used in somatic therapy:

Grounding

This approach allows customers to anchor themselves in the ongoing moment. Grounding is great for people facing flashbacks or anxiety, as it makes use of physical sensations to minimize symptoms. Methods include running water over your hands or relaxing several parts of your body, thereby giving room for awareness being back to sensation and freeing your mind from past events.

Resourcing and Visualisation 

When facing distressing feelings or thoughts, visualization and resourcing can give room for the creation of a protected sensation in your mind and relieve distress. This can be done by imagining a happy place and visualizing places, times, or people that give you peace.

Body Scans

A body scan allows you to keep a record of your body and examine the places you feel pain or bear tension. Therefore, whether lying or sitting, you should endeavor to get a comfortable position and introduce awareness to your body, beginning at your feet and gradually going up.

This activity can take as long as thirty minutes, as it is crucial not to be in a rush. However, in the process, you should ensure you take stock of everything you emotionally and physically feel, including pain or discomfort.

Benefits of Somatic Therapy

Release and Transform Trauma

Confirmed to be of help to people who have PTSD in the management of their symptoms, somatic therapy aids a lot of people in reconnecting with their bodies. This can be particularly hard for those who have gone through physical trauma, like sexual or domestic violence.

Somatic therapy focuses on the transformation of this dysregulation into regulation by working out the rule that trauma is usually saved in the body. It creates awareness as to the way your body reacts To triggers and trauma and targets the way reactions and thoughts can affect it.

Thus, by creating awareness of the location at which trauma is saved in the body, somatic therapy can grant people the tools to release it, either via mindful exercises like tai chi or yoga or mindfulness.

Develop the Tools To Improve Yourself 

Trauma can prevent us from living to the fullest and living happy lives. Yet, somatic therapy is there to rescue us by giving us the materials we need to enhance our mental health and eliminate the emotional, mental, and physical blocks that hold us back from doing so.

While somatic experiencing enables us to identify the way our body feels and the location at which our unprocessed emotions stay, it also provides us with the materials needed to process and tackle them. A lot of somatic exercises like resourcing and grounding can be finished at work or home. Hence, they can be used at any time you need to soothe yourself after facing a trigger.

Positivity

This therapy motivates you to reason more positively. This is because your mind is powerful, and like your body, it creates habits. Thus, when you encounter trauma, your body and brain become wired for survival. This could be exhausting when the fight-or-flight response turns out to be the program you are running on.

Somatic therapy can assist the brain in rewiring neural pathways. It takes you out of the mode of survival and into a conscious condition of emotional balance. It can enable you to recover from negative feelings, thoughts, and patterns.

Unlocking Wellness 

You are not only a head or body. However, when you encounter trauma, it could feel like you are living in a fog, like you are just one or the other. Somatic therapy is helpful by allowing you to become more understanding of what is going on in your mind and body, so as to heal much more thoroughly.