Therapy & Counselling

Soma means ‘body’. Our bodies are amazing! It’s like we have three brains – one in our head, one in our gut and one in our heart, with millions of neurons that interpret and respond to our environment. Research over the past 30 years shows that overwhelming experiences can produce strong reactions in our body that can get stuck if we don’t feel safe to process them. Our body remembers what happened as though it is still happening, so when we are triggered our body responds with the same high level of reaction as it did at the time. This is why working somatically is essential to heal.

We all have patterns in how we react when we are in relationships or things go wrong. These patterns are usually created when we are children trying to cope with an overwhelming situation.

In many situations, our body cannot tell the difference between reality and a thought we are having. So a reaction pattern in our body (from past experience) gets triggered by situations throughout our lives that may not be threatening, but our body thinks we are under threat, as it doesn’t understand that the past is over. So we might be easily triggered into anger, fear or any strong emotion pattern throughout our lives as our body reacts as though the originating situation is happening right now. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a clear example of this – where people have flashbacks that include physiological signs of trauma.

Working somatically requires getting to know how emotions feel physically in our body, while feeling safe to experience sensations that we have spent most of our lives avoiding. It is learning to listen to, understand and be at peace with life as our body experiences it so that we can process experiences as they happen, and so we don’t trap trauma in the body that will trigger us later on.

In Western culture, we are taught not to trust our body and to prioritise our mind, yet we are born wired to learn about ourselves and our world with our whole body.

We only need to watch how young children learn to see embodied learning in action. Our body knows how to make sense of the world, alert us to safety and how to process our emotions, as long as we understand it and know how to work with it.

By acknowledging the incredible power of our body and working with it, we have the opportunity to be all of who we are and to develop our capacity to love, connect with ourselves and be in healthy relationships with others.

Have you ever been nervous and found it doesn’t matter what you tell yourself in your mind, you’re still uncomfortably nervous in your body? The body has its own intelligence system, its own radar for what is safe for us, and is trying to communicate with us all the time – even when we don’t want it to. Our body radar has the capacity to take our reasoning offline, so it’s not surprising we struggle to find clear solutions when we’re stressed.

When our body reacts to something we know is safe (from a rational perspective), it is telling us that something has happened in the past that was overwhelming and has not healed. The current situation has triggered the memory in the body of the unresolved issue, so the body is telling us where we need to heal trauma. The body is trying to help us.

Somatic therapies focus on the sensations in our body by helping us understand what we are feeling and settling our nervous system so we can process emotions in healthy ways. Somatic therapies help the body recognise that the original overwhelming situation is over now, and teach the nervous system how to return to equilibrium.