Everything You Need to Know About Somatic Experiencing Therapy (SE)
Somatic experiencing, also called somatic therapy, has impressed the mental health and personal growth communities and individuals looking to resolve their mental health difficulties. As SE started gaining exposure, therapists promptly understood the possibilities and benefits of SE and started obtaining certifications so they could holistically help their clients. But what is somatic therapy exactly? What can it help with? How does somatic therapy work?
Well, keeping these and many more questions in mind, read through our article to learn everything you need to know about Somatic Experiencing.
What is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy, or Somatic Experiencing (SE), is a form of body-centered therapy that combines psychotherapy and physical therapies to provide holistic healing. Somatic therapies explore the connection between the mind and the body and help release stress, tension, or trauma stored in the physical body. They use talking, exercises, dancing or spontaneous movement, physical techniques, meditation, and breathwork to release the accumulated tension in the body that may negatively impact the client’s mind, body, and overall well-being.
The history of somatic therapy dates back to the 19th century, when Wilheim Reich, a student of Freud, radically stated that trauma can also stay in the body, causing pain, tension, stiffness or inflammation. Today, psychology has a whole branch called psychosomatics that is focused on the ways that psychological difficulties affect the body.
Theoretical Background for Somatic Therapy
Somatic experience therapy focuses on the body and how emotions are stored. It works on the psychosomatic theory that traumatic experiences and unresolved issues are trapped in the body. This theory explores how mental difficulties and negative emotions impact the body.
Psychosomatics dives into how mental processes and unresolved emotions tend to (unconsciously) be placed in some body parts. For example, people may feel back pain when they have too much to “carry” or they may feel nauseous when they need to “swallow” a negative experience. Similarly, they may have headaches when they mentally ruminate or shaky hands when afraid.
Today, numerous studies show that psychosomatics is scientific, and numerous psychologists and authors underline the importance of therapeutic mental health care as a prevention of disease. Gabor Mate, a famous physician, wrote a book called “When the Body says No” in which he explores the ways stress, loneliness, or other psychological phenomena impact the body and may lead to physical disease. He is just one of the numerous experts actively underlining the importance of the mindset over the physical body.
Criticism of Somatic Experiencing
Somatic Experiencing had given results for a lot of clients, regardless of whether they experienced stagnation in their talk therapy, or felt the need to start their healing journey through their body instead of their thoughts. But, some individuals and professionals are still not convinced.
As Medical News Today explains, some people express their concerns about a few aspects of somatic experiencing:
Somatic exercises may often use touch between the therapist and the client. For people who have experienced trauma, this can be triggering, or feel violative or unprofessional. In the wrong hands, somatic experiencing can interfere with the therapeutic relationship and put forth ethical or moral concerns regarding the use of the touch or physical proximity in therapeutic goals.
Another mentioned issue is the fact that SE practitioners are rarely regulated by one governing body and are often unlicensed. At the moment, a somatic therapist doesn’t need to be a psychotherapist to offer this treatment. Without proper knowledge, training or experience, the benefits of SE therapy may be diminished, simply because the provider of this therapy is not knowledgeable enough.
To work around both of these concerns, it’s best to work only with licensed therapists and professionals that have official training and licensing to practice psychotherapy. Even if they initially started their professional work with some other type of psychotherapeutic modality, they can always utilize the ethical and psychological knowledge they have when they work with somatic experiencing. If you want to learn more about the skills and abilities that your therapist should have, head over to our article on the topic.
How Does Somatic Therapy Work?
The process of somatic therapy starts with the client discussing their problems, difficulties, and bodily sensations. Then, different types of somatic therapy techniques are presented that connect the mind with the body, including meditation, breathwork, forms of visualizations, massages, grounding techniques, dance and spontaneous movement, or sensation awareness exercises.
As Harvard Medical publishing explains, somatic therapies use a few different techniques:
Body awareness (how clients feel in certain body parts or how their body reacts when it has a certain emotion)
Pendulation (guiding from relaxed state to emotionally-charged state and back to relaxed state)
Titration (guidance through traumatic memories and noting physical sensations that accompany those memories)
Resourcing (identifying resources like people, objects or places from the client’s life that may help them in distress)
Somatic therapy aims to increase the body-mind connection of the client by improving awareness about how they feel in certain body parts, or how their body reacts when they think or feel something in particular. This physical awareness lays the ground for mind-body connection and self-understanding.
SE, after developing the awareness, uses different interventions that can help the client to release negative emotions, or come in contact with mental processes that they may not be aware of. Important aspects of these interventions are “centering” and “grounding.” Centering helps the client to develop a calm home base in their body, feeling secure, stable, and calm within. This is achieved with awareness about one’s breath, mood, and muscles. Grounding, on the other hand, helps them develop the ability to release pent-up negative emotions and get back to their “calm home base.”
Then, somatic experience tries to develop and fortify resources within the client that can help them improve emotional regulation, or get out of fight-flight-freeze response. The final goal is to free the client from restrictive experiences, body sensations, emotions, and thoughts that prevent them from engaging fully in their lives.
What Can Somatic Therapy Help With?
Evidence-based somatic therapy mainly treats mental health difficulties that stem from trauma. A literature overview from 2021 explored the effectiveness of SE and found it to have a positive impact on numerous mental health conditions, including PTSD, depression, or anxiety. It is also used to alleviate the symptoms and improve management of other mental health difficulties like OCD or autism. Aside from mental disorders and diagnosis, any person can benefit from SE, as it strives to increase the body-mind connection and increase personal awareness and connection to one’s body.
Contrasted to many other, classical types of psychotherapy (like cognitive-behavioral or emotions-focused therapies), SE doesn’t focus on the thoughts or emotions, but instead, it focuses on the physical sensations and the body. That’s not to say that SE doesn’t tackle thoughts or emotions. Somatic therapy definitions underline that its first starting point is the body, and from there it slowly deepens the awareness toward the emotions and thoughts connected to those physical sensations.
Many mental-health practitioners are now combining SE with other types of therapy to help their clients from multiple standpoints. At EMDR Therapy Nashville, we combine somatic experiencing with Trauma Focused CBT, Internal Family Systems, and especially EMDR, so the treatment is adjusted to the client’s needs and provides the best mental health care we can. Somatic experiencing, fundamentally, focuses on the body and how emotions appear in the body, or how certain thoughts provoke certain sensations. EMDR, on the other hand, tackles mental health difficulties on a mental level - by desensitizing and reprocessing traumatic memories. Jointly, EMDR and SE improve self-regulation and increase the coping skills of the client. To learn more details about the ways EMDR and SE can help with trauma, visit our “Similarities and Differences” blog.
The Benefits of Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy healing operates on the idea that negative experiences don’t only bring negative memories, thoughts, and mental difficulties, but they are also stored in the body and, if untreated, can lead to physical diseases or pain.
The benefits of somatic therapy are multi-fold because it focuses on all three levels of health - the physical sensations, the emotional charges and the mental processes. Some of the most important somatic experiencing therapy benefits include:
Improving body-mind-emotions connection.
Increasing awareness about and connection to the body, its sensations, and what they mean or represent.
Thinking through experiences and what they mean and represent for the client.
Releasing pent-up emotions from past negative experiences.
Reliance on emotional resources for self-regulation.
Grounding and calming in emotionally charged or triggering situations.
Physical movement and energy release through the body.
Obtaining tools and skills to self-soothe, release negative emotions, or calm oneself down.
Increasing the ability to shift the focus to less stressful thoughts.
Strengthening boundaries and abilities to care for oneself.
Emotional release and better physical health.
Use Somatic Therapy For Your Healing
Somatic therapy exercises have proven to be highly effective for people who have experienced any form of trauma. For those clients, SE can restore the body-mind connection, increase self-awareness and support emotional self-regulation. Furthermore, it can alleviate physical symptoms that stem from unresolved psychological matters, and can provide understanding, guidance and support during healing.
For treating any mental health difficulty or disorder, the golden rule is “the sooner - the better.” Timely support, oftentimes, is even more important than the modality that the client chooses. Here, at EMDR Therapy Nashville, we are educated and experienced in helping clients through different mental health difficulties, and with the help of different modalities. All in the name of the client’s best interest and well-being.
If you have any questions, would like some more directions, or want to start your healing journey, contact us - EMDR Therapy Nashville is here for you!
References
When the body says no. Dr. Gabor Maté. (2023, October 2). https://drgabormate.com/book/when-the-body-says-no/
Villines, Z. (2023, August 22). Somatic experiencing therapy: Exercises and research. Medical News Today. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/somatic-experiencing#criticisms
Salamon, M. (2023, July 7). What is somatic therapy?. Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-is-somatic-therapy-202307072951
Kuhfuß, M., Maldei, T., Hetmanek, A., & Baumann, N. (2021, July 12). Somatic experiencing - effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy: A scoping literature review. European journal of psychotraumatology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8276649/