BLOGS

Something that I’ve been nerding out on and that has been immensely helpful in my personal healing journey and in my work with my clients has been somatic therapy. I think it’s getting more airtime due to TikTok and celebrities and people being more therapy-savvy in general. If you’ve been curious about it too, this blogs for you. 

What is somatic therapy/how is it different? 

Somatic therapy is a way of doing therapy that pays extra attention to your body and its needs and its experiences. Historically, therapy has been very focused on the mind and our thoughts and our stories. This isn’t wrong but it misses a big piece of the puzzle of our mental health and wellbeing. 

Anxiety, depression, ptsd, eating disorders, addictions, and stress involve and impact the body. A lot of our behaviors aren’t driven by how we think but also how we feel and how we want to feel. If we can understand that connection, we can find other ways to help us feel better and also learn how to tolerate our feelings and not be so desprite and reactive with our discomforts.  

Somatic therapy can feel a little different in sessions than traditional talk therapy. It keeps closer to the present moment than your past or future, and stays closer to your body than your head, and therefore feels a little slower as it can take time to learn to connect to your moment and to your body since our culture doesn’t generally teach us or reinforce us for doing all that. 

One of the goals of somatic work is to become an ally with your body instead of ignoring or controlling it. In somatic therapy we try to respect the body and its experience and its needs. Often our culture supports us dominating our body through diet and exercise and productivity. Or we subdue it with food or alcohol or mindlessly scrolling so we don’t need to pay attention to it when it’s in pain or inconvient. With somatics we want to build a relationship with the body that is symbiotic and nurturing and helpful and kind. When we work with the body we stop fighting it and learn to work with it. 

 Another aspect of somatic therapy is that it aims to make you and your body the expert, not society or some TikTok clown or your family or even me. You learn to listen to and work with your own unique body and its needs and boundaries and preferences. This has the added bonus of helping reconnecting us to our intuition and rebuilding trust in ourselves and our bodies (which is often lost in trauma). I like psychedelics and ketamine assisted psychotherapy (kap) for building the connection and trust in our own inner wisdom as well, and actually the blend of somatics and psychedelics are a very potent combo for treating chronic stress, ptsd and cptsd. But that’s a whole different rabbit hole you can feel free to reach out and set up a time to talk to me about. 

 Who can benefit from somatic therapy?

Because somatic therapy is a great tool to help regulate emotions, build capacity for life, and cultivate a relationship with the body, the short answer is: anyone who’s experienced stress and trauma…which is everyone! Especially those who have had stress and trauma and have had a hard time moving past those events or who have struggled with day to day living and current life as a result of stressors in the past. 

When we have stress and trauma and aren’t connected to our bodies, we habituate to and dissociate from pain and disgust and discomfort. But then we don’t know our boundaries and preferences. We aren’t aware of how alcohol or that relationship or our own cruel words impact us. We also don’t know how good that rest and sunshine and a big laugh can feel either. And so we don’t change anything. But when we can feel how our environment or our thoughts or habits or relationships impact us, we can better navigate how to take care of ourselves. 

Somatic therapy for PTSD and CPTSD

Trauma induces a stress response of fight, flight freeze, or fawn(people pleasing). That’s not inherently a bad thing, those responses help keep us safe. But ptsd symptoms emerge when we’re not able to perform those responses (your body wants to run but it’s trapped and the energy gets stuck in your body and you feel antsy all the time) and/or we get stuck in the responses (I needed to fight to protect myself but now I’m still braced for a fight even though I’m in a safe environment). When this happens our bodies feel chronically unsafe and disregulated. 

 If we can’t find safety we are chronically stressed and might develop injury or get sick or develop go distress, migraines, or auto-immune symptoms. If we can’t find safety we can shut down and avoid and feel numb and that looks like depression. Or feel keyed up and tense and get panic attacks. Or we try to avoid the feelings in our body with food or drugs or sex or shopping or scrolling mindlessly online or whatever else. 

With reconnecting to the body, the goal is to be able to get back to the present moment and back to a felt sense of safety after stress. The goal is not to feel good all the time. It’s to have flexibility to hold joy and safety and be able to be with yourself and nurture your body in sadness and fear and anger and shame and also take action when stressful events happen. 

Easy somatic practice to try

Take a breath and notice your surroundings. Notice where you are and who’s around. Maybe notice the temperature or brightness of the room. Look and see if you can find something in the room that you like. What happens as you look at it? Maybe something softens or expands or feels warm or tingly. See if you can find the place in your body that responds and put your focus there. As you focus, it might change and get bigger or smaller or it might move or might disappear. Just notice. And…you did it. You did some (obviously not all) somatic therapy!

Psychedelics are having a huge renaissance and spike in popularity. I think it’s rad and I’m all for helping people get access to it to see what it can do for them. 

But they’re not for just everyone. Particularly if….

• You just want to get high

• You want a one and done experience 

• You don’t have time for therapy

• You want clear, linear and yet also profound answers 

• You feel pressured to get better fast 

I have done kap myself and have done it with clients. Ive seen the benefits first hand. I have read the research and it’s game-changing. If I didn’t believe in this shit I wouldn’t promote it. But with popularity comes hype and expectations, so I feel the need to right-size it. 

The confusing thing about such a promising, complex, and powerful tool is that we can make it “the thing”. It easy to turn this new medicine and the sparkly psychedelic frontier into the new god, the guru, the magic bullet. Our fear and shame can latch onto the promise of it and create urgency to have this thing be the quick fix. When we do this we set ourselves and the medicine up for failure. Our desire, when only originating from our brains and seeped in ego and shame, can be bigger than our capacity and we can try to move faster than we’re ready. You need a stable base, otherwise whatever you and the medicine might build in the session can end up being top heavy and topple over and create a big mess. 

Ketamine assisted psychotherapy can be like 10 years of therapy in a session. But it’s only going to be spiritual bypassing or addiction if you just get high and think your problems will be solved. 

You have to do the prep work to be clear on your intention and be willing to also trust yourself and the medicine and let go of expectations. You also have to be willing to do the less sexy ongoing therapy and somatic practices and journaling and have the support of the community and the loving relationship with yourself to support it.  

Sometimes psychadelics shows you your shadow. Are you ready to confront and own your shadow? Sometimes it shows you your light. Can you be responsible with all that light? Sometimes it reveals heavy truths. Do you have the support of your relationships for when those truths are to heavy to carry alone?  

None of this is to scare anyone away diminish from the incredible transformation that’s possible with ketamine assisted psychotherapy. I do however want to highlight the importance of daily practice and ongoing therapy to integrate the wisdom and insights that come with journeying into your heart and subconscious. We want your wings to be strong enough so you can still fly after the fairy dust wears off. 

There’s a lot of talk about reparenting yourself in therapy. A lot of that talk comes from me, to be honest. I think it’s crucial in healing. A lot of what’s ruptured in trauma and depression and eating disorders and addictions is our relationship with ourselves. We become neglectful at best, abusive at worst. This lack of care for ourselves not only leads to worsening our mental health symptoms, but it erodes our trust in ourself and love for purself. Any why would you fight as hard as it often takes to fight for your mental health if you don’t trust or love yourself!?? 

The relationship with the self also impacts our relationships with others. If we don’t know what we feel and what we need, how are we going to communicate that with others? We’re going to be resentful when our needs aren’t met or others can’t help us. We might also be resentful and jealous and judgemental of others who can know their needs and ask for them to be met. 

While “reparenting yourself” is a cute idea, what does it mean??? Especially if we didn’t have good models of healthy parents it can be overwhelming and feel impossible to know what to do. Because of this, I’m sharing some basic buckets of healthy parent behaviors. Even if you don’t know what being a good parent to yourself FEELS like, you can start with what it behaviorally LOOKS like and act your way into the feeling part. 

1. Take care of basic needs in a balanced way. One of the first things are caregivers do to take care of us and show love is taking care of our basic needs. They feed us and clean us and help us sleep. This is one of the ways we can take care of ourselves and show ourselves love as well. Even if you’re not feeling like it or feeling like you like yourself, you can still do self care. Sometimes that’s ALL you can do! Get to bed at a reasonable time, eat balanced meals and don’t skip meals or eat too much, get some sunshine, take a shower, take medicine as prescribed, etc. Hopefully you’re already doing these things. But either way, when you do them, do them as an act of love and care. 

2. Take time to play and treat yourself. Stressed parents can neglect this or shame it or be overwhelmed by a kids play. Maybe the roles are reversed and, instead of being a playful kid, the kid turns into the caregiver. Being an adult in a capitalist society can reinforce lack of playfulness. Add mental health and stress issues and play can be hard as adults. If we have trauma play is especially hard because to play is to let your guard down. But letting ourselves engage in play (which can look like art, hobbies, sports, parties, etc) is super important. Nurturing caregivers delight in the play of their kids. They know that joy and laughter are important and support exploration of fun. When we’re reparenting ourselves it’s important for us to play.  If you already do sports or hobbies, lable it as play and see if you can bring the “play” vibe to those activities. If you are noticing as you read this that you don’t play, it can be helpful to do what you did as a kid or think about what your friends do for fun and try that and explore what feels fun to you. 

3. Take time to rest and be cozy. Nurturing ourselves is the opposite of hustle culture. Society tells us that our worth is in what we do and achieve and how busy we are. But what baby was industrious?? What baby was on their grind?? Yet they’re maybe the easiest humans to love! And it would be wild if their mom loved them by sending them to work and making them be productive!! Instead we love babies by letting them rest and snuggle and be comfortable. We can love ourselves the same way. Nurture yourself by taking a nap, letting yourself rest, wrapping yourself up in a blanket or comfy sweats and not having to do a certain thing or look a certain way to be good enough. 

4. Pay attention and check in. Some parents are absent or busy or dismissive. As adults we can be that way with ourselves. We just go about our days oblivious to what we’re doing and how we’re feeling or what we need. Or we notice it and shame it. Or we focus on others or food or we drink away our feelings. We become neglectful. Being a good parent to ourself involves paying attention. Some exercises I like can be taking a few minutes a day to journal or doing a body scan and seeing how your body feels and where you might be holding pain or tension as well as what parts of your body feel good. Even if you feel numb and have a hard time noticing how you feel, keep at it. It can also be helpful to think about what happened during the day and guessing how one might feel. For example, if I review my day and notice that I didn’t sleep well last night and had a tough meeting with my boss and sat in traffic and haven’t talked to any friends today, it’s be fair to guess I feel stressed and maybe lonely. I can assume that my shoulders might be tense and my heart may be heavy or my head may be foggy. Then see if that fits. See if any part of my body perks up as I lable the emotions. 

5. Harness that mamma bear energy. Reparenting isn’t just soft and squishy. Sometimes it needs to be fierce. We didn’t all get parents who were willing or able to protect us. Some of us even had parents who were the ones who harmed us. When this happens it’s easy to have a hard time standing up for ourselves and leaving harmful situations. We may not have felt worthy of being protected or we may have felt that our assertiveness would be punished or that our anger (which fuels our assertiveness) was scary or dangerous if we saw other peoples anger be scary or dangerous. But when we’re reparenting ourselves we must not wait for others to rescue us, we need to protect ourselves.  We need to harness our anger and not repress it. Protecting ourselves might look like having a hard conversation. This may be asking for a raise or asking neighbors to be quiet so you can sleep. It may mean you suggest therapy for you and your partner or end a relationship. It may mean that you share with your friend that you’re hurt and upset by them cancelling plans or habitually being late. If any of these feel too big to jump into right off the bat, you can write out a script or imagine saying what you need to say and see how that feels. Often it can be a little scary but also exciting and relieving. The more we do it, the easier it gets. That protective energy either goes in or out. If we don’t speak our truth and stand up for ourselves, that energy turns inward and looks like chronic stress and dis-ease. Anxiety, depression, and digestive issues can often come with not protecting ourselves effectively. It also erodes our self trust and self worth. 

A word of warning: this is harder than it looks. Not only does it take a lot of thought and energy, it is confronting work. You might notice feeling that it’s stupid or that you aren’t worth it or it doesn’t matter. These are often thoughts on the way to the deep grief that you didn’t get these things as a kid. You needed them and didn’t get them. Ironically feeling the sadness and grief of noticing how much you needed and didn’t get is a step towards that compassion and self-love you want. It’s also an opportunity to practice being a good parent in the midst of that grief. 

As you’re exploring this concept, here are some journaling prompts or questions to ponder: 

1. think of a time when you were a kid where you had a need or a big feeling and a caregiver nailed it and was present. This might give you clarity on what you can do for yourself even as an adult. 

or 

2. think of a time where they missed it and imagine what you could have done instead

or

3. imagine a friend or a child or your child came to you with a similar situation, what would you say? More importantly, what would you do? 

Even with all these thoughts and suggestions, I get that this is still a super complex topic. Feel free to ask for help! Healthy parents are resources parents who ask for help. Nothing says you should or need to figure it out on your own. Get in touch and we can work on it together!