How Can Somatic Coaching Help With Anxiety?
How can somatic coaching and bodywork help with my anxiety?
Somatic work is one of the most effective ways to combat anxiety attacks and panic attacks. This is because anxiety often isn’t about the content (the narrative or story) of what’s happening in your life: anxiety is what’s happening in your body that then often produces the painful narratives you have about yourself and your life.
We often focus too much on the content of our anxiety and panic
When clients come to see me they mostly begin by talking about what’s going on in their life that has them wanting to explore somatic coaching and bodywork. This is the content. And understanding the content for the purposes of understanding the context for our work together is vitally important. This is necessary and appropriate, at least to an extent.
In the beginning, it very often appears to us that the story of what is happening in our lives is creating the increase in anxiety. “My family member acts this way or that way and it makes me really anxious, scared, or angry.” “When I need to speak in front of others I lose my confidence and become anxious or fearful.” Etc.
How somatic coaching is different than therapy
It’s absolutely the case that the circumstances we find ourselves in contribute to our anxiety. And yes we all need extra support during trying times. However the mistake is to assume that by delving into the details of our story - our drama - we will “figure it out” and our anxiety will be fixed. As someone who spent years in therapy better understanding myself, I also know that understanding why I am the way I am is very different than understanding how I am the way I am. The former focuses on the mind; the latter focuses on the body.
What somatics reveals is that our narratives about our life circumstances (our content we so often focus on) are often connected to our old, deeply-rooted self-narratives about ourselves, who we are, our worth, our shame, and our fear of loss. In other words, the story in our heads is often connected to our core wounds and core stories about ourselves and the world around us. This often looks like “I will be hurt”, “I will be alone”, “I am bad” etc. And these old narratives cannot easily be dealt with through cognitive processing because these narratives are stimulated by sensations in your body. In other words, these old fears arise from particular sensations in your body - often a numbing, a tightening, a rush of energy, a change in temperature - that then send messages to your brain that something is amiss. First there is a trigger, then there is a bodily change in sensation, then there is an old story about something undesirable (or outright terrifying) that is going to happen. Importantly, it doesn’t mean something is going to happen! It simply means your old “body memory” is trying to keep you safe in the best way it knows how.
Working through the body to become more relaxed
The key here is that it is not the case that we have a particular thought that then causes bodily sensations of anxiety. It’s the other way around: we have a bodily response which then produces all sorts of anxiety-based thinking. Focusing on the thinking is not going to make us skilled in addressing the bodily response that preceded it. Before we can think clearly about our situation, we have to resolve our internal physical anxiety. This requires practical, specific practices to help us relax our muscles, our eyes, our voice, and our breath. We have to actually come into a body and a physiological state that can support us in seeing the situation clearly and not through the biased lens of our historical pains and traumas.
Put differently, we have to learn how to relax in our bodies to effectively approach the drama of our life from a place of authenticity and maturity. If you are ready to explore how somatic bodywork can support you in living in a body that supports the future you want for yourself, send me a message.