What the heck is somatic therapy?

Thomas Hanna, the man who gave us the term ‘somatics’ (and did so in Gainesville!), defined somatics as “the field which studies the soma: namely, the body as perceived from within by first-person perception.”

In less academic terms, somatics is the study of how you feel inside and your direct report of it.

Somatic psychotherapy is an approach to therapy that asks us to keep the body in mind while we are working with your current experiences. While I may notice the possibility of tension in your body, signaled to me by your shoulders rising up toward your ears, you would confirm the accuracy of that assumption through perceiving into your body. I cannot know your internal experience and you are the authority of our interpretation of what is happening within it and being expressed from it.

Okay, so what happens in the therapy room?

Together we will work to reduce your experiences of distress and increase your sense of safety and connection with yourself and others. We will do this through psychoeducation, talk therapy, and the choice to work with somatic practices and EMDR in session.

Somatic practices aim to increase your connection to the information you have inside yourself as well as give more choice in regulating states like anxiety and dissociation. This may look like feeling into emotional expressions with supportive tools, like resistance bands, and/or tracking sensation to help us understand something that feels true in the body. It may look like grounding through your breath or back-body to lower hyper-vigilance or standing up and moving as needed. The goal is to integrate and not override your body with rationalizations and logic because, frankly, it doesn’t work. Instead, we will find the meanings that do validate your body’s experience and work with your body to reshape chronic states of distress.