Somatic Therapy
Somatic Trauma Therapy | Somatic Stress Release™
Cultivate bodily awareness, Restore safety; Attain mind-body integration.
‘Soma’ is a Greek word for ‘the living body known from within’, or known to the Self. This ‘knowing’ signifies wholeness. Somatic Therapy is an experiential approach towards mind-body integration. The pain, overwhelm, and coping responses manifested by trauma take us away from feeling at home in our body, and as a result there is often a split within ourselves.
Somatic Therapy helps:
• Restore the body as a place of safety while helping to expand the capacity to process body (preverbal and nonverbal) memory
• Metabolize unprocessed emotions
• Complete thwarted (incomplete) stress responses
• Restore our optimal relationship to our self and the world around us.
Somatic Therapy offers techniques for clients to sense and regulate their own physiology and states of being. This includes building more internal and external resources, building trusting and co-regulatory relationships, learning to turn inward with compassion, being invited deeper in the body, and given time and space to process the trauma. These somatic techniques unwind trauma and restore well being.
Somatic Trauma Therapy.
A holistic approach to trauma defines trauma not as an event, but rather as a disruption and overwhelm to our body-mind’s capacity to adapt, thrive, and flourish.
It is essential that social, developmental, and cultural factors are considered when reflecting on a client’s trauma history. By not acknowledging these contextual factors we do the individual a disservice.
The symptoms of trauma may occur immediately or emerge over time from the compounding stress and challenges of processing and adapting to the experiences of life. Symptoms of trauma emerge as the body and mind attempt to cope with and resolve the stressors.
The effects of trauma may include:
Physical symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, tightness in the body, muscle tension, digestion challenges, and constrictions around the breath.
Emotional symptoms such as flatness / inability to feel, fear, anxiety, panic, overwhelm, loss of choice, difficulty feeling comforted, anger, and shame.
Psychological symptoms such as dissociation, mental rumination, low self worth, negative self talk, self blame, memory challenges, depression, and loss of interest in activities.
Relational / Social symptoms such as isolation, loneliness, relational and attachment reenactments.
Trauma can lead to feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and groundlessness. It interferes with our ability to feel real in body and mind, it disrupts our very sense of existence, and takes us away from the present moment. However, as Dr. Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing says “Trauma is a fact of life. It does not have to be a life sentence.”
Symptoms are the gateway to healing trauma. Our job as practitioners is to listen and hear the messages and wisdom encoded in the body.
Somatic Trauma Therapy encompasses a wide range of approaches to restore well-being. Each of these are based on the foundational principle that healing and integration happens through our bodies' primal language of movement, breath, and sensation. Additionally, body awareness helps us access an internal source of wisdom that guides the healing process and builds resilience. Each of these therapeutic approaches use different techniques to support the unwinding of trauma. The intention of a unified approach is to embody the foundational principles of somatic trauma therapies and utilize the many tools and techniques to support ourselves and others.
Somatic Stress Release™
Somatic Stress Release™ is a holistic system to enhance body awareness and increase capacity to complete biological stress responses. The intention is to restore and optimize your fundamental ability to adapt and navigate life with ease and agency. You will learn how to enhance your capacity to identify internal responses to stressors, and mobilize that energy towards restoration and ease.
Stress related health challenges are now a widespread global issue. Research links stress to physiological conditions like cardiovascular distress, immunosuppression, and gastro-intestinal problems. Stress adversely impacts attention, concentration, critical thinking, and other cognitive functions. Family and social relationships suffer.
While we might perceive stress as happening around us, it is actually happening within us. A physiological stress response happens throughout every system of the body, ultimately interacting with every cell. Our stress responses are interwoven with our emotions, immune function, thoughts, breath, and movements.
Our innate stress response could be described as a natural and helpful response to adapt and thrive in the world. But at times a lack of support and resources take our stress response offline and thwart our ability to utilize our stress response to navigate and have agency in relation to our current situations. When this happens we are unable to properly process and mobilize stress. We begin to form compensational patterns that over time wear down on our nervous system and show up as challenges to our health, focus, productivity, behavior, and relationships.
As we lose our ability to adapt, we start to experience a flooding of incomplete stress responses, known as chronic stress. Chronic stress wreaks havoc on our health, impacts biological energy conservation, and makes us less attuned to the need for self-care.
Somatic Stress Release™ is a holistic approach that recognizes the complex layering of each individual's relationship to stress. Stress manifests itself in each person’s body differently. Understanding this unique body response allows each person to process and navigate the intricate layers of stress. One of the most effective pathways towards that awareness and negotiation is through feeling a deeper sense of and connection with the body-mind, an approach called somatics.
The inability to process and actualize our stress response creates an overwhelm in the body. This can take us away from feeling at home in our body, and creating a split within ourselves. This disconnection leaves us with less resources to work through stress to adapt and return to balance. Addressing this damaging cycle is an integral component of this modality.
The Details / Investments
Coming Soon