Healing Trauma
Somatic Experiencing
By Pablo Das (HHC,SEP)
“The body keeps the score”.
“The issues are in the tissues”.
“Bottom up vs top down”
These are some of the ways that practitioners of Somatic Experiencing communicate about the centrality of the body in the resolution of trauma. It’s a frequent occurrence in my coaching practice, that I have a client talk about the limitations of just “telling the story” in talk therapy. Telling the story is, in fact, very important. I don’t dismiss this at all. I wrote about its importance just yesterday. But sometimes what’s held in the body and driving our (trauma) symptoms needs to be dealt with too. Sometimes, there’s no story to tell. This is how we arrive at a distinction between top down (talk therapy) and body centered (bottom up) approaches to trauma resolution like the one I did my own healing in called “Somatic Experiencing”.
In Somatic Experiencing we can use the story of a traumatic experience to access what is held in the body and then we set the story aside and work with what has been accessed somatically.
[I am offering a discounted block of 4 sessions for $499 for first time clients until Jan 7th. Use Link-tree in profile or message me directly ]
Sometimes what’s held in the body has no story attached to it. Especially if the trauma occurred early enough in life, that we have no explicit memory of the event or conditions that caused it. And even in adult life, humans have a profound capacity to erase the memory of overwhelming events. It’s not uncommon for someone with a trauma history to have periods of their past where there is no memory of what happened. So we need to access that content in a different way. We begin with the body.
There’s something profound that happens in bringing awareness to the manifestations of trauma that are held in the body. The simple act of tracking a tightness in the chest can unlock memories, emotion, sensory experiences like smells or sounds and even the body’s behavioral impulses. Often we’ll find ourselves in a memory of an old surprising situation. Something that happened as a child. As we spread awareness to the body and it’s impulses we may ask, “what wants to happen?”. All of this organized around finding empowered self protective responses that we couldn’t access back then. These responses might show up in the body as an impulse to run, to fight, to push, to brace, or to protect. Bringing these unfinished self protective responses to completion is at the heart of the S.E. approach.
Sometimes this work is less dramatic than that. One of my favorite aspects of the work of somatic experiencing is the process of working to support a client’s nervous system to simply experience periods of deactivation. Often when we can support such deactivation and the person feels calm, there’s a part of them that’s saying “no, don’t do this! This isn’t safe”. This is a very predictable part of the work. People report that voice all the time. It’s as if the person’s conditioning has taught them that if they let down their guard, something bad will happen. So we use awareness to acknowledge both the settling in the system and the impulse to override that settling out of fear that the “other shoe” might drop. We create distance between the hyper vigilant part of us and our capacity to soften anyway. That voice no longer runs the show. Over time, we train the system to understand in an experiential way that there are no consequences for softening the hyper vigilance and that it is ok to relax and feel calm.
Ultimately, what we want is a system that has the capacity to activate when it needs to respond to threat, and deactivate when it’s appropriate. We want both. People who have been impacted by traumatic events are sort of stuck in activation or sensitized to activate over the slightest associations with or reminders of traumatic situations.
In the context of the supportive relationship provided by the practitioner, the body can soften and we can develop a set of skills that can support safe renegotiation of trauma and free ourselves from being stuck in the past.
Welcome back to now!
Heal on, trauma queens!
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Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.
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