Stuck After Years of Therapy? How Somatic Healing Supports Nervous System Regulation
You’ve read the self-help books, you’ve done the cognitive therapy. You have the mental awareness and self-reflect on the regular. You journal, reframe, and affirm. You catch your cognitive distortions and unpacked your core beliefs. You feel like you’re an honorary therapist with all your CBT knowledge. And yet you feel a barrier to the bridge into action. You find yourself wondering, “if I know all of this, why am I still feeling this way?”
While the answer might be time and self-compassion (when we’ve spent decades reinforcing now-unhelpful survival strategies, it takes more than a little bit to rewire, after all!), you may be noticing a need for approaches that aren’t solely cognitive.
What Is Somatic Healing?
From the Greek, soma: the living body, somatic approaches are body-based ways of healing. Somatic therapy approaches include: EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Therapy, and Dance/Movement Therapy.
Somatic therapies recognize that our bodies hold and manifest emotional experiences and traumas. By incorporating various techniques such as breath work, mindfulness, body awareness, repatterining, and creative movement, somatic therapy encourages clients to explore and release tension, stress, trauma, and emotions held within the body.
Floating Head Syndrome
Somatic approaches are particularly helpful for what I’ve termed “floating head syndrome.” We’re conditioned to overly prioritize what we think, to make decisions based in measurable facts, to analyze and over-analyze to the point of exhaustion.
And through this conditioning, we’re left feeling out of touch with the wisdom of our body. And not just in a “fluffy,” intuitive way (although this is not “fluff” and highly important).
With chronic conditioning to over-think and over-analyze, we lose touch with our physiological cues and our ability to pay attention to what our body needs and knows.
At any given moment, are you able to accurately describe what you’re sensing in your body and what you’re feeling emotionally? See if you can identify four sensations your body is experiencing right now.
How about emotions? Can you identify a range (type and intensity) of emotion that you’re holding at this moment? When you identified either of those, did the words “I think” emerge? Oftentimes I’ll ask someone to name a feeling and what follows is a thought.
This exercise is not meant to shame or embarrass but to highlight just how few of us have been modeled ways to experience and value from in “bottom-up” way (aka body then mind). And this can show up in our language or lack thereof as well.
We often are much more familiar with a wide range of expressing our thoughts, interpretations, beliefs, notions, ideas, cognitions, and opinions but often struggle with naming a breadth and depth of emotions and sensations.
Key Benefits of Somatic Healing
So if we haven’t been taught or modeled emotional identification and expression and sensation identification and regulation, what might we experience when we do explore these?
Working with a somatic therapist can support many areas of life, including simply rebalancing your own internal experience and self-understanding.
You can also experience the benefits of:
Nervous system regulation
Releasing stored trauma
Rebuilding trust in your body
Interrupting perfectionism patterns
Deeper, more restorative rest
Where to Access Somatic Healing Approaches
All of our clinicians at Bellamy & Associates take a holistic mind-body-spirit approach to wellbeing. Specifically, myself (Katie) and Jayme Kelton are dance/movement therapists who trained specifically in somatic therapy.
I also host an annual retreat, HEAL: A Somatic Wellness Retreat focused on using both cognitive learning and experiential/somatic learning to support high achievers, caretakers, empaths, and eldest daughters unlearn perfectionism and people-pleasing and experience a nervous system reset.
Interested in somatic approaches? Book a consult call or retreat inquiry call to get started!
