Somatic Trauma Healing: The Easy, No-Nonsense Handbook of Jaw-Dropping Psychotherapy, Bodily Intelligence, & Awareness Techniques You Can Start Today

By Astral Shadow Publishing

Have you been suffering in mind & body, & can't seem to get to the bottom of it? It could be that you need somatic therapy techniques.

 

Talk therapies can be great for working out painful memories, traumas, & feelings, but they often forget to acknowledge a major component: the mind is only part of what makes up the body. In many cases, our society has separated symptoms of chronic illness from the root cause: trauma. This means that we are often only putting bandaids on surface symptoms.

 

The issue is that we don't actually have the room that trauma is now taking up within us, & this is often a cause of chronic illnesses & pain. Not to mention the added strain of our body constantly existing in a state of stress & fear. Even if we aren't actively experiencing a trigger, our neuroception is most likely hardwired to think most things that are not threats are, and we're burning through our feel-good resources.

 

As we encounter trauma in our everyday lives, the effects build up in our system, which is why it is important to take the time to clear it. The good news is, you can!

 

Take a second to imagine how you'd feel if you could get to the root cause of your ailments & pull the roots out with both hands. What if you could tend to your somatic garden & uproot the damage that has been inflicted upon you, much like removing weeds? This is where somatic therapies come in.

 

You'll encounter the truth to:

• Why something as small as insults can compound & affect you as much as a monstrous traumatic event
• The overlooked methods to determine whether your ailments are caused by trauma or something else
• The forgotten element that could be subtracting decades from your life expectancy
• Why everyone else is getting mindfulness wrong & the more potent way to approach it
• The amazing anatomical breathing centers that no one seems to be paying attention to
• How to give back to yourself by creating a trauma-repelling forcefield
• How to get to the bottom of your subconscious & let it speak in a tangible form
• Why a blank canvas & paintbrush could help you lower blood pressure, help the immune system, reduce inflammation, & improve brain function
• Access to a wealth of accompanying online resources and downloads!

& a whole lot more!

 

Best of all, using somatic methods at home doesn't require you to break the bank or use any unnecessary tools. Many somatic exercises are extremely easy to learn on your own & are available to everyone!

 

So if you want to know how to skyrocket your well-being in a new, easy, & exciting way, then click buy now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Astral Shadow Publishing
• Release date: Mar 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215864432

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The discussion of mental health has been making its presence known in recent years—a good thing, as many people are using this awareness to bolster the confidence to ask for the help that they need. Unfortunately, because the open discussion on mental health is so new, there is very little that is being said about the treatment options for mental health disorders or help coping with difficult life circumstances such as a death in the family, a difficult divorce, or even the toll a chronic illness may take on one’s well-being.

The most commonly known treatment options are talk therapies, where you sit with a professional, discuss the feelings that you have, and work through them by way of behavior correction, situational dialogues, and even medication where necessary. This is known as psychotherapy, which focuses on the use of psychological methods and modalities in the hopes of changing one's behavior to improve their situation, outcome, and overall emotional status. Generally, with psychotherapy, there is a relationship that is built between the person seeking treatment and the professional providing the service, usually a psychologist or psychiatrist. The goal is for that professional to provide a safe and open space for the client to discuss their situation and for them to create a productive dialogue to improve their quality of life.

The most well-known version of psychotherapy is cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. CBT takes a very practical approach by focusing on the actions that lead to a situation and determining how one might be able to change them in order to improve quality of life. The goal is to change behavior and develop coping skills by way of behavioral analysis and homework assignments that are meant to make the client more self-aware of their contribution to the situations that feel completely out of their control. For a lot of people, it works—though it can be time-consuming and often take years of commitment to get results. There can also be a medicinal component to it, where a combination of medicine and counseling help the patient get back up on their feet. It’s a tried and true approach, with countless testimonials from family, friends, and internet folks discussing its benefits.

If not CBT, another version of talk therapy is acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which is newer to the field and takes a more humanistic approach. Psychoanalytical approaches such as ACT turn the focus more on feelings and the roots of situations in order to try to figure out where feelings and reactions may stem from rather than trying to change reactions and behaviors due to external stimuli. It takes us one step closer to where we’d like to be—a holistic, accepting approach to the way things are—while still sitting back on the behavioral focus of most talk therapies. ACT’s goal is to allow you to see that there is good and bad in the world and to be okay with that. Rather than trying to change the meaning of something or redirect the outcome as CBT might, ACT may have you confront the uncomfortable feeling—similar to exposure therapy—until the worst possible thing no longer feels like an impending disaster. It’s confrontational, a little more real-world, and aims to be far more authentic than its older, more deep-rooted counterpart.

Still, while both aim at bettering an individual’s mental health, both of them also leave out a major component of their patients: the entire body that the minds they’re working with are contained within. Talk therapies can be great for working out all of those painful memories, traumas, and feelings, but they forget to acknowledge that minds are only part of what makes up the human body.

That’s where somatic therapies come in.

One of the lesser talked about treatment options for mental health and part of the homeopathic healing remedies; somatic psychotherapy is a type of therapy that works to integrate the discussion of the body back into the talk therapy that’s been so centered around the mind. Somatic psychotherapy is meant to be the middle ground of these two, where talk therapy and bodywork meet to help work through trauma and experiences, as well as acknowledge where that may be stored in the body to let it go. Where CBT may ask the well-known, ...and how did that make you feel?, somatic psychotherapy will ask instead, ...and where did you feel that in your body? The goal is to bring the focus back to the entirety of the self rather than the external factors.

Somatic psychotherapy is the psychological branch of the science of somatology. Somatology, rooted in the Greek word soma, or the body experienced from within, is the holistic science of human experience and behavior, as defined by Thomas Hanna in his book Bodies in Revolt (Palo Alto University, 2014, 00:01:22). The focus of somatology is to show that there is a distinct connection between the human nervous system, the physical sensations of the body, and the experiences of the mind.

Peter Levine, a leading name in the somatic therapy field, discusses this notion in one of his talks regarding the self-to-trauma ratio. He believes that the higher sense of self a person has, the more likely they are to be able to handle and overcome trauma. The lower someone’s sense of self is, the more likely that trauma is to stick. Somatic therapy’s goal is to help bring a person to a place of self-awareness where they are able to acknowledge and handle that trauma in their own right. Talk therapy can sometimes fail to do this, as it focuses on the situations less than it focuses on the person, and it focuses even less on the body.

There is also scientific evidence of the way that the body holds onto trauma. Our nervous systems are broken down into two main parts: the autonomic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is what is responsible for our reaction to stressful stimuli, that flight-or-fight reaction that we feel when we feel scared or threatened. The parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is responsible for what comes after that threat is no longer present, when the body starts to regulate itself back to a state of calm. It controls when we cry, when we drool, and when we need to use the bathroom—which explains why the feeling of fear is so closely connected to all of these things. In a normal body, the SNS and PSNS work together constantly to help keep us all at a happy medium so that we don’t always feel incredibly high or incredibly low.

When we’re exposed to stress consistently, however, that’s when our body starts to short-circuit, to put it simply. When our body is constantly stressed out and doesn’t have time to calm down, as the SNS reaction is quick, but the PSNS reaction takes time, then we can get stuck in our stress-reaction states. If we’re up, then we can be jumpy, reactive, irritable, or constantly waiting for the worst possible thing to happen. If we’re down, then we believe everything that happens is the worst thing, we feel lethargic, and we can’t get ourselves going again. That’s because the consistent stress has turned into trauma for the body, pushing it outside of its ability to regulate itself and breaking down that regulation period.

Somatology focuses on breathing and body-focused therapies that share many of the same practices that are recommended for recalibrating the PSNS when it’s been thrown into a state of dysregulation by repetitive stress. Somatology and the therapies that stem from it have roots in most world cultures with ancient healing techniques, using methods of meditation, stretching, and shamanic practices, such as spirit work, to help the body and mind work as one unit.

It was defined as a therapy in the context we understand it first in the 16th century and then again in the 19th. Wilhelm Reich, a student of Sigmund Freud, was noted for his work in somatic therapies in the 1900s when he discussed his belief that many human feelings and emotions were translated into physical symptoms that he called body armor (Bell, 2017). Even Freud believed that there was a physical component to the psychological when he proposed his own concept of conversion disorder. Though both received backlash for these ideas and Freud’s conversion disorder concept was generally disregarded in later years, Reich’s notion that there was a physical manifestation to psychological issues became the backbone for what is today known as somatology.

There is one downside to somatic therapies as a whole, however, and it is that many holistic practices are not recognized as medical necessities by insurance. It can get expensive to see holistic practitioners. Because even as the mental health discourse comes into the mainstream, the holistic medicine discussion remains on the back burner. There are many people who still feel that traditional medicine is going to be far more helpful than the homeopathic method rather than considering the middle ground where the two might overlap and work together. Modern-day medicine and homeopathic medicine can and should exist in tandem so that the entire body, rather than just certain parts, is considered in the healing process. That means that even when it may be most beneficial to you, it can be hard to find an affordable holistic option.

The goal of Somatic Trauma Healing is to start that process. The upside to somatic therapies is that a lot of the work is personal, meaning that you can do a lot of it on your own if you know how. This book aims to outline the basics to get you started without the assistance of a trained professional or guide. It’s meant to be digestible and easily implementable so that you can work at your own pace to take your first steps toward whole-body healing.

This book will focus on what somatic healing is, which techniques may be most beneficial for you to use, and what types of somatic therapies are going to help you in certain areas. We will also briefly discuss the different types of trauma, how they may have manifested, and what ways are best to go about addressing them. Though the process of somatic therapy is focused on trauma healing, the book will remain relatively mild in regard to in-depth traumatic experiences. Still, a warning remains in place to proceed with caution and keep yourself in a safe, loving, and comforting environment, as any trauma work can be difficult.

1

UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF TRAUMA

DEFINING TRAUMA

When we hear the word trauma, it usually conjures thoughts associated with overtly distressing, devastating, or painful events. People have also talked a lot about childhood trauma in recent years and the effects that this can have on our adult lives, a topic we’ll come back to later in the book. However, trauma can just as easily come from our adult years and be subtle or barely perceptible to our conscious minds. Anything that keeps our minds or bodies locked in a repetitive, self-preserving habit can be considered a trauma. Even when it’s not specifically registering as something obviously traumatic, there is still a pressure of sorts that builds, constricting the health of the mind, body, and spirit and causing complications for the individual mentally, physically, and emotionally.

Small, repetitive events can build on each other until they amass the same impact that a large traumatic event might have. We talked about this in the introduction, but the PSNS is responsible for calming us down following a stressful event. When we are exposed to repetitive stress, there is no time for our body to calm down. That stress will continue to build until what is akin to a traumatic event is registered in the body—even if we were never in a perceptible traumatic event, like a car accident. It can be as simple as one bad thing after another happening to us without giving us a minute to breathe, which can wind up causing these same feelings in the mind and the body.

Regardless of the source, whether that’s a debilitating accident or seemingly minimal daily encounters like insults, we interact with trauma on a daily basis. Due to the holistic way in which trauma affects us, this has far-reaching effects that are both clearly distinguishable as well as imperceptible.

Many of us may not be aware of it in the beginning. In our society—especially in the way that talk therapies are constructed—there is a lot of pressure to suppress or ignore emotional responses to certain situations. Though talk therapy means for us to address what we experience, it spends more time with us reliving those experiences and retraumatizing ourselves than addressing the fact that it’s already happened and we need to let it go.

When going through trauma, we can feel incredibly overwhelmed and as if we may never feel safe, no matter what we do. This is part of getting stuck in that state of constant stress. The more stress we experience without the ability to calm down, the more our body recognizes that state as our new normal. We become more anxious and more in tune to perceived threats. It’s harder for us to experience a sense of calm or safety. It can also make us feel like we lack power or agency over our lives because we cannot control our thoughts and feelings. We recognize something is off but can’t quite pinpoint what it is or why we’re reacting in a particular way.

The other part of this