Written by Sam Mishra, The Medical Massage Lady
Sam Mishra (The Medical Massage Lady), is a multi-award winning massage therapist, aromatherapist, accredited course tutor, oncology and lymphatic practitioner, trauma practitioner, breathwork facilitator, reiki and intuitive energy healer, transformational and spiritual coach and hypnotherapist.
Even if we think that our bodies are where we reside, how come so many of us don't fully understand them? Anxiety, panic attacks, emotional dysregulation, insomnia, and irritability, among other things, can be brought on by stress, depression, and trauma. Although the body produces symptoms, we rarely think of it as the root of healing. We are able to view the environment we live in through our physiological responses. The health implications of poor sleep, obsessive thoughts, future-focused worry, sadness, and trauma are catastrophic. Mental healing is insufficient to restore the body, which is under attack.
Many clients have confided in me about their traumas, often revealing a deep detachment from their physical bodies and inner selves, resulting in a disconnection from life as humans. Anxiety can lead to addiction and unhealthy habits, which can conceal our inner pain. Everyone has the wish to be fully immersed in this human experience, to truly feel alive in our bodies, but therapists often fail to apply the body's inherent wisdom in their practice.
We can use several types of somatic therapies, for example, somatic movement, breathwork, and eye movements, to work with our clients' inner selves. This holds true irrespective of the modality we employ as therapists, as each of us stands before a living, breathing entity. Increasing the client's body awareness, a potent transformational tool, not only benefits the client but also enables the therapist to relate to their own body state, aiding in the client's further discovery of body wisdom.
Our culture has greatly benefitted from the integration of mindfulness into various complementary approaches that connect to the client's inner landscape and bodily awareness. It could be challenging to incorporate the somatic sensations into a cohesive practice, though, if there is a lack of integration. Traumatised clients must learn how to safely delve deeper into the body experience in addition to practicing mindfulness.
How can we assist customers in their embodiment? The precise techniques employed will differ for every individual due to the wide variety of somatic practices available and the need for the client's experience to appear as natural as possible. However, we must never forget that each client's body wisdom is the most valuable healing tool available to us.
We recommend counselling for those with anxiety or depression because we believe that cognitive reasoning alone can solve problems. However, emotions have been excluded from bodily awareness due to Western culture's propensity to value the mind over the body rather than trusting in the body's intelligence. When it comes to overcoming physical or mental illnesses, holistic awareness is crucial.
Cultural customs and beliefs undoubtedly influence our clients and our own understanding of somatic work, but by acknowledging the intelligence of emotions, we can enhance our understanding of how our thought processes influence our physical experiences. Trauma patients vividly demonstrate the interconnection between our experiences, mental states, beliefs, emotional patterns, and physical embodiment.
In addition to soothing the mind, mindfulness allows us to pay attention to our bodies and hear our soul's underlying rhythms. The rise in popularity of mindfulness in recent years has also highlighted the importance of self-fulfillment and the worldwide need for stress alleviation. By incorporating awareness into our daily experience of the body, we may alter the present even though we cannot alter the past. Somatic treatments can strengthen the mind-body connection.
Speaking as someone who has experienced significant trauma, I can attest to the profound fear of the symptoms of that trauma, as well as the deep-seated longing to return to the complete self. This somatic awareness arises from a profound understanding that there is a means to restore health. Trauma diminishes a healthy mind and heart, corrupting the awareness of the body, as the person operates from the head space, or ego, which is meant to protect us from threats, rather than from the heart space. Many clients with PTSD experience somatic complaints, making the inclusion of the body a crucial factor in trauma memory recovery and the healing of trauma symptoms. Because the client functions from the head space, or ego, which is supposed to defend us from threats, rather than the heart space, trauma corrupts the client's understanding of the body by severing their connection to their body, sound mind, and heart. Since those with PTSD develop many physical problems, trauma healing and memory consolidation must involve somatic therapy.
What does somatic mean?
Somatic experience refers to the process of self-perception that involves both emotional and physical feelings while acknowledging that sensations and emotions are not synonymous, despite their connection. While feelings, which originate in the neocortical region of the brain, are crucial for memory resolution, emotions are primal, sensory-based reactions, such as biochemical alterations in the brain, that occur before feelings. The brain's perception of emotions results in mental experiences of physical situations; for example, appreciating the flavour of a pizza without feeling anything—imagining eating pizza in Venice—might lead to a rush of memories, sentiments, and experiences. It is possible to feel sensations on their own, providing a firsthand experience of the body that can provide fresh insights. Similarly, trauma clients may experience a surge of painful memories linked to specific bodily sensations.
Proprioception, or self-awareness through movement of the body, is another facet of somatic therapies. Presence through emotions, feelings, and body states, as well as physical movement, contributes to a unified understanding of the body through the interaction within the nerve pathways. Since trauma clients frequently experience mental and emotional symptoms within their physical bodies, somatic work can help them access their internal and external resources to stabilise any dysregulated symptomology. From a position of presence, they can then investigate possibilities for addressing emotional and physiological patterns. For trauma clients, this explains why somatic therapy works so well.
Why do we need embodied self-awareness?
We spend less time feeling and more time using media and technology to pass the time when we are bored in this modern-day culture where embodiment feels completely unattainable. Emotional and physical detachment, numbness, dissociation, and indifference are the end outcomes.
Being embodied enables us to develop empathy, enabling us to protect and empathise with the suffering of those around us. We become out of sync with the universe when we lose touch with our feeling of embodied self. In today's society, less people are spending time in nature, children spend much more time on technology, and adults are distracted, causing isolation while social media thrives.
Many people do not regularly tune into their bodies on a daily basis, rarely realising throughout the day that we are constantly sensing and feeling through our bodies. We only become aware of what is going on when we experience problems such as physical tension or pain.
Perhaps we might consider embodiment to be a survival mechanism; for instance, if we are incapable of feeling pain, we may burn our hand in an oven. Our bodies use pain as a critical warning sign to make us aware of danger. Plus, we can experience growth, security, warmth, and connection when we love sincerely.
Social conditioning, which repeatedly interprets our thoughts and beliefs, creates refinements or judgements that impede the unmediated experience of self, known as embodiment. This is a transmission from our true self, presenting the body's unprocessed information as presence, free from the constraints of the past or the future.
We should not ignore the direct link between our body and our true self, which enables a continual awareness with internal and external perceptions as a lived experience, but mindfulness techniques can be included in the healing process.
Which clients can benefit from somatic interventions?
By allowing the client to explore and determine what works and what doesn't, somatic therapies can help them to become more self-aware and self-advocate. Delivering somatic approaches well requires an understanding of and accurate assessment of symptoms, which includes evaluating the way clients move their body, how their body reacts to emotions, and the language they use about their body. You have to pay attention to how the client's body language reflects what they are saying. Clients who are stuck in traumatic memories, those who have unexplainable physical symptoms, and those who are already aware of somatic work are typically the ones who are receptive to it. Given that somatic work necessitates a secure setting, a trauma client experiencing extreme fear or resistance due to past boundary violations may find it unsuitable. Somatic work may be too demanding for trauma clients who dissociate, as it requires a certain level of self-awareness and curiosity about the body.
Conclusion
Somatic therapy can be incorporated into a wide range of other modalities, using body mapping, mindfulness, somatic movement, alignment exercises, breathwork, body image work, sound therapy, emotional freedom technique, somatic resourcing, or polyvagal therapy. It is up to the clients to determine which techniques help them develop self-awareness, even though we as therapists can introduce them to many approaches.
As Stanley Keleman said,
“If you’re an alive body, no one can tell you how to experience the world. And no one can tell you what the truth is, because you experience it for yourself.”
Read more from Sam Mishra
Sam Mishra, The Medical Massage Lady
Sam Mishra (The Medical Massage Lady), is a multi-award winning massage therapist, aromatherapist, accredited course tutor, oncology and lymphatic practitioner, trauma practitioner, breathwork facilitator, reiki and intuitive energy healer, transformational and spiritual coach and hypnotherapist. Her medical background as a nurse and a midwife, combined with her own experiences of childhood disability and abuse, have resulted in a diverse and specialised service, but she is mostly known for her trauma work. She is motivated by the adversity she has faced, using it as a driving force in her charity work and in offering the vulnerable a means of support. Her aim is to educate about medical conditions using easily understood language, to avoid inappropriate treatments being carried out and for health promotion purposes in the general public. She is also becoming known for challenging the stigmas in our society and pushing through the boundaries that have been set by such stigmas within the massage industry.
References:
Fogel, A (2009) Body Sense:The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness. W.W.Norton. New York
Keleman, S. (1985)Emotional Anatomy: the structure of experience. Center Press
Kuhfuß M, Maldei T, Hetmanek A, & Baumann N. (2021) Somatic experiencing - effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy: a scoping literature review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology. Jul 12;12(1)
Levine , P (2010) In an Unspoken Voice:How The Body releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley, CA.
Moneta ME, & Kaechele H. (2023) A theoretical and clinical perspective of an embodied view in psychotherapy of somatic symptoms disorders. Research in Psychotherapy. Aug 25;26(2):605.
Weber, R. (2022) A case for somatic practices as embodied mindfulness. Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, Volume 9, Issue 1-2, Dec 2022, p. 9 - 28
