What is Somatic Experiencing?
Cognitive-based therapy can help us reframe our thinking and understand the “why” and root of our responses, but changing our patterns requires changing our felt-experience. That's where somatic experiencing can be helpful.
I remember going to talk therapy for the first time and dedicating myself to working on some attachment issues that were coming up in my relationships. After a certain point, I gained the knowledge and tools to be able to recognize and cognitively understand where my behaviors and responses were coming from, but I was finding that I still felt stuck in my patterns. I had witnessed some powerful shifts, but overall I was sensing that I needed a bigger release. Now I was well aware of my problem, and could psychoanalyze myself and my responses, but I didn’t have a holistic way of altering my embodied reality.
Soma means "of the body." And basically it's just about getting in touch with your body and living a more embodied life — not just through your head.
When we experience something like a conflict — either a conflict with someone we’re in relationship with, or we receive a message from someone, or we find ourselves having a heightened response to someone’s actions — somatic experiencing, like cognitive-based therapy, teaches us how to notice our response to what’s happening. Our nervous system is telling us that there’s a problem and the alarm bells are going off to get our attention. Our nervous system is designed to constantly be scanning our environment to see if there are any potential threats or dangers, or if we are safe.
Instead of acting on the first impulse, somatic experiencing invites us to get in touch with our body and get curious about our response instead. Here, we see if we can make room and create some space between our impulse or gut reaction, and the story we’re telling ourselves about what happened. Maybe the story is that we’re unsafe, unloved, unworthy, unwanted, or that we’re being rejected or abandoned.
Trauma is stuck energy in our bodies and we create stories about that traumatic experience to protect ourselves in an effort to avoid experiencing it again. If we can’t metabolize the stuck energy we will end up subconsciously playing it out through fight, flight, freeze, fawn responses (survival mode). To get out of the cycle we have to slow down, get curious about the story we're telling ourselves, question it, and ask ourselves what we need in the moment. Usually it's something like eating, drinking water, sleeping more, exercise, music, taking a bath, talking to a friend, etc. — activities that allow us to resource ourselves and come back into presence and grounding. This is basically the practice of inner child work or re-parenting.
So let's say you want to help yourself be less avoidant. When it comes to a feeling you might be having that feels uncomfortable see if you can "pendulate" or "titrate.” You would dip your toe in the water of the feeling and then go back out of it so as not to overwhelm your nervous system. It's about developing a more conscious relationship with your felt-bodily experience and "attuning" to yourself. Attunement is a psychology word related to child development because it's important that adults mirror, affirm, or attune to their child's emotions and needs and that's how children can develop a secure attachment.
According to the American Psychological Association (APA) attunement is “the matching of affect between infant and parent or caregiver to create emotional synchrony. The parent’s response can take the form of mirroring (e.g., returning an infant’s smile) or be cross-modal (e.g., a vocal response “uh oh” to the infant’s dropping cereal on the floor). Attunement communicates to the infant that the parent can understand and share the infant’s feelings.”
For those of us who lean towards insecure attachment styles like avoidant-dismissive, anxious-preoccupied, or fearful-avoidant, we didn't experience enough attunement from our caregivers growing up, so it's our job now as adults with more power and capacity to learn how to attune to, and resource, ourselves.
We've built coping mechanism up to avoid our feelings and our embodied experience for a reason. It's a brilliant design of our system to do this because it has kept us alive during times of great emotional, spiritual, psychological, and/or physical stress. Often as we get older, we start to notice that our ingrained responses and the stories we tell ourselves are limiting us and keeping us stuck. We may not be able to go after our goals and dreams with confidence and clarity, or we may find ourselves playing out the same patterns in our relationships, work, or otherwise. When we’re ready to change our responses and felt-experience, we need to go slow with the process otherwise we can end up re-traumatizing ourselves.
Avoidant leaning folks need to learn the skill of co-regulation — to trust and rely on others more, to allow others to help them feel their feelings, and to express their emotions instead of bottling them up and saying "i'm fine." Anxious leaning folks need to learn how to resource themselves, trust that they are safe even when there’s space between them and loved ones, and learn the skill of self-regulation. Fearful-avoidants could use a blend of both.
Somatic experiencing is a life-long healing process. It's about coming back in touch with your body. We've all been stripped of our connection with our body and spirit because of imperialist-white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy as bell hooks called it.
I was raised in an Irish Catholic household and this resulted in a divorce of my body and mind. I was taught to be ashamed of my body — how it is and what it does naturally. Sex before marriage meant you're a slut!! But there is no such thing as a slut. And because of this, I often exclaim that I'm a proud slut! This simply means that I own my sexuality whatever that is to me. Slut is a patriarchal construct that was created to wield power over women. It doesn’t matter if you’re someone who is sexually active or not. The slut construct is a tool to control our bodies. This has detrimental impacts on men too. The consequences of this kind of sexual-shaming are exponentially more violent for trans, non binary, and gender fluid people.
This divorce of what is truly whole and one (mind, body, spirit -- funny that this sounds Jesus-y) is what needs to be reconciled.
Somatic experiencing gives us an approach to move closer to that healing. It's not THE answer or only approach, of course. For example, anti-racist education is absolutely integral to our collective healing. It’s crucial for white people to work towards healing our attachment to “the construct of whiteness” (this is language I learned from Kenya Budd, an Equity and Inclusion consultant based in so-called Portland, Oregon), which is inseparable to our bodily, felt experience in the material, physical world.
This is where understanding somatic experiencing gels with astrology and our connection to spirituality or "the divine." Organized religion says we aren't God. God is this outside/higher being. But truly we are all God/Goddess/the Divine. There is no separation.
Under this ethos that we are all one and that there is no separation between us, God, and the “natural world,” is the work of healing our connection to our body. There are strategies, practices, frameworks, and exercises within somatic experiencing that we can learn to help us reconnect with this truth.
On a basic level with somatic experiencing, we’re healing our nervous system and working to come back into presence and a regulated state. There are so many of us are living our lives absolutely dysregulated for good reason. We live in systems of oppression that are constantly traumatizing. Capitalism and white supremacy are not conducive to a regulated system!
The question is how can we resource ourselves, and find presence and regulation in this traumatizing world? This is absolutely not all up to us as individuals. Ultimately, true, collective healing can’t occur until we completely abolish these oppressive systems. And I do mean abolish. Abolish the police, abolish prisons, and abolish the military-industrial complex. For more on this you can visit the work of Mariame Kaba and Angela Davis.
It’s also important to note that the goal isn’t to be perfectly regulated all the time. If you’re a Virgo rising like me and subconsciously seek ways to control everything about your environment and relationships, maybe it will be a relief to know that it is actually physically impossible to be regulated all the time. Let yourself off the hook if you feel like a failure for not being perfectly regulated and calm 24/7. We actually want dysregulation at times because it's our body's inherent alarm system telling us that danger or threat is near. This issue is that our system sometimes alerts us to threats that aren't actually threats, or they are threats that have passed, and we are actually safe now. It's our job to get curious about our bodily experience and discern if we are actually in danger or if we can be safe experiencing the present moment.
For more support check out Embodied Healing Strategies for Anti-Capitalist Entrepreneurs. And stay tuned for the next cohort of Healing Through the Second House.
Sending all my love!
xoxo,
Erin
