Can Somatic Psychology Help Me?
Before going to see a psychologist, we often wonder if we are making the right choice or not and if the psychologist whom we will consult will be able to solve our problems or answer our questions. Since you are here, you might be wondering if I am the right sort of person to work with. It’s important that I tell you about myself and the people I work with.
The kinds of people who come to me whom I'm able to help effectively are often people who have one or more of the following issues:
Stress: Perhaps you feel stressed all the time and can’t seem to relax or settle down?
Patterns: Or are there patterns in your life that you keep repeating with relationships, or money, or how you deal with situations that you can see are not helping you get the outcomes you want?
Unfulfilled: You may feel like you are doing everything you are supposed to do to be happy, but still, you feel unfulfilled, or flat, or unhappy in your life.
Connect to Your Somatic Wisdom: If you are reading about somatic psychology approaches, then you may be sensing a deeper connection with yourself to help you be “more of yourself” or “all of who you are.”
Mental Health: You may be experiencing anxiety, depression, or other issues with your mood.
Emotional Overwhelm: You may notice that you are feeling overwhelmed by your emotions, and you don’t know how to maintain your balance when that happens.
Trauma: You may have experienced trauma (which you may or may not remember) and you can feel it is impacting on your quality of life.
Healing Inter-generational Trauma: You see patterns in your family system and how you are caught up in the unresolved issues of your family.
Personal Growth: You may be interested in your personal development and growth.
All of these issues are where somatic approaches can be very powerful, and they are where I work best. It may be that you have come up against something really stressful that's happened in your life, and you are looking for extra support in how to deal with things. Often, we've tried everything we can in dealing with a situation that's happening in our lives, and we can feel like we don’t know what else we can do. So we're looking for someone who can help us to broaden our capacity to deal with what's going on in our lives effectively, really settle in our own emotional world and create a way forward.
Often, people will come to see me to help heal significant trauma, like emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, neglect, a traumatic accident, or an assault either in their childhood or current. They can feel that the trauma is alive in the way they feel, and they do not know how to heal.
With somatic work, it's very effective in helping people to process and deal with trauma. One of the most important elements for all of us as human beings is that we feel safe in our body to feel our experience, our sensations, and our emotions. People usually come to me for support in those aspects. And at other times, it will be people who recognize that they don't really feel as comfortable in their own skin, or they don't trust themselves very much, or they could feel disconnection within themselves. They can feel this sense of something missing. For example, they may think, “I'm doing all the right things according to the world. I've got the job, the marriage, the kids, and all of those sorts of things, but I feel like I'm exhausted. I'm just not my full self.” In all of these situations, we need to bring the body into the equation as our somatic truth is our authentic truth.
We need to pause and take a moment to ask if “all of you” is aligned in the direction you are travelling in your life. Is there a little voice that whispers, “This is not it”? What happens when you drop into your body and feel whether this is actually really right for you, from a mind, body, and spirit perspective in terms of what you're doing and how you're dealing with a situation?
Some people come to me when dealing with issues around transition, trying to work out what they want to do, moving from one thing to another. Somatic work is really helpful, as your body is a great guide for decision-making.
A very powerful healing opportunity comes from looking at how we carry the unhealed stories of our ancestors in our own lives. As a Family Constellation facilitator, I work with people to identify and resolve some of the ways they are loyal to the struggles of their family that don’t belong to them. Family constellations, combined with somatic work, are powerful ways to look at some of the patterns that we repeat from our unresolved family traumas that we might not even know about. The patterns are in our body, they're in our system, and we feel like we're always nervous, or we're just constantly in these relationships that just seem to go the same way; we want to break that pattern.
So, if any of those sorts of issues resonate with you, that's the kind of work that I do. Feel free to reach out, and I will look forward to meeting you.
Until next time, stop, take a slow breath, listen to your body.
