Why We Need Somatic Integration in Therapy
Centering the body in therapy doesn’t always feel intuitive. The anxious thoughts, sadness, pain, and stress feel like they’re clouding your mind, not your body. After all, it’s called mental health…right?
Mental health has physical symptoms
Difficult life experiences are held in your body as patterns of physical tension.
Think about it. When you’re stressed, your mind is racing but your body is also responding. All your emotions- anger, sadness, joy- have physical components.
And when you go through a really stressful time, your body remembers. There have been excellent books written on the topic including The Body Keeps The Score on ways your body holds onto traumatic stress and Focusing by Eugene Gendlin for how to access your felt sense.
Physical tension, chronic pain, and stomach issues are all signs that your experiences are showing up in your body. Of course, there can be purely physical and medical explanations for each of these, but when the patterns keep showing up and can’t be fixed with physical interventions, that’s a sign there might be a psychological cause.
Your body is a guide
When you learn to listen to what your body is telling you, your physical symptoms can reveal the things that you are feeling but can’t put into words.
Mindful awareness gets you back in touch with these vital messages. Our modern society places a lot of emphasis on the mind and rational thought. As a result, many of us have become separated from our body’s way of reacting and expressing emotion.
It takes practice for you to re-learn how to listen to what your body is saying through your patterns of physical tension, discomfort, and stress. But as you learn to hear the messages, you’ll get more attuned to your needs and learn how to take care of them before they escalate.
Your body is a source of healing
Heal your patterns of physical tension by learning to read the messages your body is sending you through mindful awareness.
Here’s a pattern I see ALL the time: you’ve been in therapy before and you know all the tricks to calming the mental chatter of your anxiety. But as soon as you feel like you’ve gotten a handle on your stress and anxiety, you start getting chronic migraines or chronic stomach issues.
Chronic issues are a pattern where your body is literally SHOUTING at you that something is deeply wrong. That pattern? Yeah, the stress and anxiety didn’t actually go away. When you get really good at dealing with the mental symptoms, you’re actually just pushing down the messages.
Your mind and body are connected. So when your mind is unable to tell you that there’s something wrong, your body will speak up. And since those migraines or stomach issues are caused by the stress and anxiety, you need to deal with that as the root issue.
Somatic therapy honors the intelligence of your body
A body-centered mindfulness approach gives you insight into how your mental and physical health are connected.
If you resonated with the last example, you’re probably ready to jump straight in and try somatic therapy. If you’re pretty new to therapy, you’ll get more out of an integrated approach that deals with both sides at once so you can feel relief from both your mental and physical symptoms.
We refer to this as body intelligence for one key reason: its function is meant to be helpful and to keep you aware of the things you need to know. These symptoms might be disruptive, but they have a purpose that is intended to be for your benefit. We work from the assumption that it has a good reason for sending these messages, not that it’s hostile, bad, wrong, or stupid.
Do I need a therapist to do this work?
The true but unsatisfying answer: it depends.
You will want to practice somatic integration with a therapist if any of the following are true for you:
You dissociate because of physical or sexual trauma
You tried somatic work before and it was overwhelming
You have trouble recognizing your emotions
You feel stuck in the emotional patterns
You need help with pacing this work
You can probably practice somatic skills on your own if:
You have a good handle on your mental health and just want to get more in touch with your body’s messages
You don’t have a trauma history
You know how to regulate yourself when you feel overwhelmed by thoughts, emotions, and memories
Connect with me for online somatic therapy
If you’re curious about how somatic integration can help you, contact me to schedule a free 15 minute consultation today.