“FEEL IT TO HEAL IT.”

Have you ever heard this phrase? It might seem a little cliché, but there’s some truth to it. We need to experience our emotions to process them. If we don’t allow ourselves to really feel it, we can’t move towards healing it. Although there’s some truth here, this expression simplifies a nuanced and deeply personal process. If only “feeling it” were that simple.

Enter: Somatic Psychotherapy — a body-centered approach to healing. The concept is simple on the surface, and complex just below. Soma means body. Grounded in the mind-body connection, Somatic therapy is guided by the belief that our body holds our unprocessed emotions and traumatic experiences. To that end, healing does not only impact the body, but can start there.

feel it to heal it

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feel it to heal it 〰️

In most Western cultures, our understanding of ourselves is through the lens of a top down approach. Essentially, we start with mind. We think our way through things. We’re so connected to the mind, but not very connected to the body. If our body was a house, we spend most of the time in the attic. And this makes sense! Both in the cultural context (our focus on the “thinking” mind) and within our communities (family, friends, etc.) Most of us don’t grow up being cued to feel into our bodies. We talk about our feelings, but we don’t necessarily go inward to explore what they feel like.

This is not meant to discredit the healing benefits of talk therapy (a top-down approach). Cultivating insight, identifying triggers, and building coping skills are essential for integration. A holistic approach honors the mind-body connection by bringing the body into the room.

What is Somatic Psychotherapy?

Somatic Therapy takes a bottom’s up approach to healing, which is exactly what it sounds like — paying attention to the body’s sensations first. Have you ever felt immediately afraid, seemingly out of nowhere? Or gotten a pit in your stomach when everything seems to be going fine? Maybe you’ve experienced the physical sensations of anger, but your situation seems totally okay? These physical sensations are the messengers of your nervous system — something is not quite right. Somatic work allows us to turn our attention to the body and the wisdom that it holds.

It’s important to note that Somatic therapy is interdisciplinary and includes yoga, bodywork, physical therapy, etc. For the purpose of this post, we’re focusing on psychotherapy side of somatics. Modalities include Somatic Experiencing (Dr. Peter Levine), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Dr. Pat Ogden), and Hakomi (Rod Kurtz). While there are differences across these different theories, they are all grounded in the healing power of the body.

What is Cognitive Bypassing?

Cognitive Bypassing is a survival strategy that we typically use to avoid feeling our feelings in the body. Instead of somatically experiencing the emotion, we think about the feeling. We understand, ‘I feel sad because that experience was sad.’ but there’s no sadness present in the body; there’s immense distance between what we’re saying we feel and what we’re actually feeling. I don’t know about you, but I felt a bit @ed when I first learned about this.

Cognitive bypassing is a protective coping mechanism. We often have feelings that are so unsafe to feel, so we dissociate, numb out, or intellectualize. It’s important for us to honor these survival strategies AND create safety so that we can gently move into holding and feeling our distress as a way to heal.

Where is Somatic Therapy most helpful?

Somatic Psychotherapy was originally created for individuals who’ve experienced trauma. And like we’ve talked about on the blog before, there are a broad range of events that can be considered traumatic. And what matters even more than the content of the experience is how our mind and body processed what was happening in the moment.

The severity of the event does not equate to the severity of our trauma symptoms.

In other words, trauma isn’t the specific event in of itself. Trauma refers to the way the event get processed or stored or held in the body. An event can become traumatic if it is experienced in aloneness. For example, a child comes home from school and communicates to their parents they were bullied. This experience resulted in the child feeling scared, overwhelmed, anxious and disconnected from their body. Say the parent minimizes it (“then don’t play with that kid”) or all together dismisses it (“I’m sure that didn’t happen”). The child is then left to deal with both the cognitive (e.g. “I am not safe”) and somatic impact (e.g. tummy in knots, heart racing) of that experience, alone. As they grow older, they may feel overwhelmed or triggers is specific situations, say being in a bathroom alone (as that is where the incident happened). Due to the trauma not being discussed in connection with a safe adult, they struggle to know how to work through those big emotions that may have attached to that experience.

Somatic therapy looks to understand the somatic manifestation of that experience, and works to release it.

For a deep dive on how trauma impacts the mind & body, check out our past blog post. For now, we’ll stick with a quick snippet from the article:

The nervous system is one of the links between our minds and our body. Your nervous system’s primary job is to constantly scan your inner and outer environment for cues of safety or cues of danger. Trauma can result in encoding neutral cues, or even cues typically encoded as safe, as dangerous. Which can mean that you may logically understand that you are safe, or that you are in a situation where nothing is wrong, but your body may be telling you the opposite.

Somatic work can help individuals with trauma understand their nervous system responses, reconnect to their bodies, and ultimately move towards processing the physical sensations and emotions that became “stuck” as a result of trauma. That being said, somatic interventions can be helpful for working with a wide range of presenting issues (e.g anxiety, depression, stress, addiction, chronic pain, etc.) Especially when working from the mind-body paradigm, incorporating somatic interventions are a key element of healing and growth.

Key Concepts

Somatic Psychotherapy is a big category so we definitely can’t cover all the concepts here, but I wanted to give you a little intro of what somatic work might look like:

Relationship building & psychoeducation

Like all therapy, Somatic Therapy begins with cultivating a trusting relationship. Only within the safety of this relationship, do we find the capacity to move towards embodying our difficult emotions. We’ll also learn about the nervous system and the physiological mechanisms that make up our emotional experiences. This is where we might explore feeling ‘stuck’ or constantly cycling through fight-flight-freeze, or shutdown states.

Developing somatic awareness

Again, most of us didn’t grow up in an environment that encouraged embodiment. On the contrary, we may have been taught to leave our bodies behind e.g "You’re not tired. You’re not hungry. Please stop.” Developing somatic awareness is a little like learning a new language. This might look like exploring our sensations, identifying areas of openness and tension and beginning to articulate our felt sense. Our felt sense is not a mental experience, but a physical one. It’s a bodily awareness of what’s happening around us or within us. In somatic therapy, felt sense is a key ingredient in the healing process.

Cultivating Safety (Resourcing)

Before we can move towards difficult emotions, we need to develop a sense of safety and stability. Resources can range from thinking of significant, protective figures in your life to creating a “safe space” (real or imaginery) that you can return to for a sense of peace.

Embodying Felt Sense

Once we’ve created enough safety for the body, we can soften and move towards the embodiment of our distressing emotions. This is the part of somatic work that is centered in true feeling. It’s essentially a body-based mindfulness practice to stay present with and process our emotions. It’s important to note that the ‘feeling’ element of somatic work is done in small doses, also known as titration, so that we don’t overwhelm the system. This is where we bring in resourcing to move us into feeling of safety when the discomfort feels like too much.

To make this a bit less abstract, let’s bring in an example. It’s important to acknowledge that somatic psychotherapy will look different with every client and every clinician. This is just one example of how we might bring the body into the room.

Let’s say that I’m struggling with my inner critic. It’s loud, rude, and holding me back. Often, before working directly with the felt sense of the inner critic, we need to increase our capacity to physically feel into the body (developing somatic awareness) This can look like exploring the definitions of proprioception (our sense of movement or location of our physical body), interoception (our sense of what’s happening within us), and kinesthetic sensation. This might start with exploring pleasurable sensations. What feels safe? What feels good? How can we explore engaging and staying present with your body as you experience pleasurable sensations?

After building trust with the therapist and focusing on resourcing (cultivating safety) we might move towards body-based curiosity: Where do you feel the inner critic in your body? What does it feel like (tightness, warmth, difficulty breathing, pressure, cold, sharp, dull, etc)? Is there an emotion there, beneath the inner critic? Let’s try sitting here, with your critic and feeling with it (embodying felt sense.) And we’re not trying to cognitively understand, but to get curious within the body about why this experience is here. After describing the sensation, we might just say with it, inviting in our resources if we start to feel dysregulated.

The TLDR? If our bodies hold our stories — our deeply-ingrained, often subconscious emotional experiences, then healing calls for a coming home to ourselves. To our bodies. To healing our nervous systems and restoring our felt sense of safety. Somatic Therapy helps us explore what it feels like to be embodied. To slowly, safely be with our feelings and explore our experiences through the wisdom of the body.

If you feel pulled toward this topic and want to work with one of our integrative clinicians reach out for a free 15-minute consultation. If you’re interested in therapy but a little unsure, this is a good way to dip your toe in the pool.

〰️ Stay gentle out there 〰️

About me:

I’m Amy! I’m a therapist-in-training & a human learning to live gently. Other call-outs on my resume include: Matcha latte enthusiast, subscriber to rest culture, and avid fan of embodied living. *I believe that we are all innately whole and enough*. Without doing anything! Just as we are. I believe that when we *slow down*, there is much more to see, hear, feel, and notice. *Healing starts with softening*. We’ll go from there.

References:

J.L. Taylor, Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, (2009.)

Hanson, Forest (Host) “Somatic Psychology: Using the Body to Heal the Mind with Elizabeth Ferreira” Being Well Podcast. Feb. 2023

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997)

Mehta N. Mind-body Dualism: A critique from a Health Perspective. Mens Sana Monogr. 2011 Jan;9(1):202-9. doi: 10.4103/0973-1229.77436. PMID: 21694971; PMCID: PMC3115289.

Theodora Blanchfield. (2021, November 2). What to know about somatic experiencing therapy. Verywell Mind. Retrieved April 21, 2023,