Somatic Movement

“The mind narrates what the body knows. Story follows state.”

-Deb Dana

How can somatic movement help me?

Somatic therapies are touted as one of the most effective ways to work with people who have experienced chronic stress or trauma. These therapies take into consideration the mind-body connection, and recognize our bodies hold our stories. One goal of somatically oriented therapies are to tap into the stories our bodies hold and make them conscious. They also recognize that emotions have a physiological origin and root.

When an individual experiences a stressor, their body & brain will automatically communicate with each other to engage in a fight or flight response, this is also known as a stress response. In prehistoric times, this response mobilized us to flee or fight off threat for survival purposes. In modern times, threats to our nervous system may not come in the form of predators, interested in eating us, but in the form of interpersonal conflict, pressures of work, financial worries, and other daily stressors. While the forms in which our threats take have shifted over time, our physiological responses to stress have not changed since the prehistoric times.

When our body undergoes a fight or flight response, a flood of stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol is released into bodies. In response, our heart rate increases and our large muscle groups tense in anticipation of fighting or running. Our breathing becomes short and rapid, and we may even start to sweat a bit.

Our survival responses have a very physiological component. Even when a stressor passes, many of us do not have effective ways of discharging this mobilized energy, and it may stay with us. Over time, as these physiological responses maintain themselves in our nervous system, telling our brains to continue pumping out stress hormones and maintaining the stress levels in our body, we may be forced into a shutdown/freeze response. The evolutionary purpose of this response allowed for us to stay very still, hide, make no noise, and essentially “play dead,” as a last ditch effort for survival, in hopes that the predator would leave us alone for livelier prey. Essentially there is a conservation of energy in this response. Heart rate slows, digestion and appetite wanes, there may be a stiffness or lethargy in the body.

In emotional terms, we can think of fight/flight as anxiety and anger and shutdown/freeze as depression. You may also hear the terms hyperactive and hypoactive. Many of us may be either chronically stuck in one of these responses or shift back and forth between the responses and spend very little time feeling regulated, peaceful, and content.

Because our prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of rationality, reason, emotional regulation, and impulse control is offline during stressful situations and traumatic experiences, chronic experiences of stress and traumatic experiences are largely stored in our implicit memories or unconscious. In other words, our “thinking” brain is often not online. Therefore, traditional talk therapy can only go so far. The body, nervous system, and brain need to be involved in treatment together. Somatic therapies and movement engage the body to release the stuck energy that has been stored, as a result of stress responses or trauma responses.

Somatic movement with Bri:

Sessions and specific interventions will be tailored to each individual’s needs. We will help you reconnect or connect with your body for the first time. We may engage in exercises and movements that foster deeper awareness of how certain emotions and feelings feel in your body ( this is called somatic awareness). This might look like helping you explore and answer a question like “how do you know you feel anxious currently, what in your body tells you you’re anxious?” We will explore what state you may be functioning in (fight/flight/shutdown/freeze) and explore specific exercises designed to restore regulation into your nervous system, based on what state you may be currently operating in.

I am certified in the Trauma Conscious Yoga Method, so we may explore incorporating elements of yoga such as breath work or postures and process that it was like to incorporate those movements. We may tap into exploring spontaneous movements your body would like to engage in and providing a safe space for you to engage in those movements. We may experiment with props like resistance bands, light weights, fidgets hula hoops, etc. Everything is always an invitation, and we will only go at the pace that feels comfortable for your nervous system.

I tend to sprinkle these exercises into my regular talk therapy sessions, however, we may also choose to engage in sessions that are more solely movement based and experiential. Sometimes folks like to engage in both talk sessions and solely somatic sessions and rotate between the two. We can explore together what might be the best fit for your needs. In the past, I have offered more solely movement based sessions to people who have been working through a period of time where they may be experiencing an increase in acute stressors. I have also structured sessions around healing intergenerational and developmental trauma.