Somatic Bodywork & How Your Body Responds To Stress
All people are born with the same needs: to feel safe, feel seen, feel a sense of belonging, and feel a sense of self-dignity. Because we are each born into a unique and imperfect life, the people, the institutions, and the culture we are part of and that surround us often make it difficult or impossible to get these needs met. As a result, we each shaped ourselves to get these needs met as best as possible.
Stress Responses Are Often Conditioned In Childhood
For example, the child who is told she won’t be held by a parent (assumed source of safety and belonging) until she stops crying will eventually - if under enough duress - learn to stop crying in order to reconnect with that felt sense of safety and belonging. Like all responses to stress, the child in this example doesn’t stop crying simply by thinking her way out of it. Rather, she creates a physiology (a body, or a “shape”) that contains or stops the expression: she may learn to tighten the diaphragm, the abdomen, the throat, the eyes. She may also learn to numb or disconnect from these areas of the body so as not to feel all the sensation that wants naturally to emerge. If she is successful in regaining this sense of safety and belonging, it registers deep in the nervous system as a successful strategy. Once the body registers a successful strategy to manage stress, it easily (and almost always unconsciously) “sticks” in the body as a go-to response when under pressure. It is in this way that the body often holds memory in the form of chronic (and, because I can’t emphasize this enough, mostly unconscious) tightness and contraction.
This means that many years later, often unbeknownst to her, this same child will be conditioned to tightening and constricting in her belly, diagram, throat, eyes in the same ways when she becomes anxious. If it happens in an acute enough manner or over a long enough time, we could even say that these constrictions become their own source of anxiety (perhaps a topic for a different time). Importantly, all of this physiological tightness happens as an adult even though the original context has long since become irrelevant. Now an adult, the person in this example may well find herself predisposed to physical and emotional health issues connected to those same areas she learned to contract, displayed in the form of gastrointestinal issues, trouble breathing deeply, or issues speaking up due to a clenched throat. Becoming conditioned to tightening the eyes from a young age can make the prospect of crying as an adult (an often necessary part of release, regulation, and grief) extremely challenging.
The Link Between Our Past and Present Stress
There is a direct link between how in our bodies and where in our bodies we first learn to armor ourselves from the pain of the world and the host of physical, emotional, and mental challenges that we face as adults. Feeling how this link between our history and our present self lives in our nervous system can be incredibly therapeutic for clients, and should be one of the core offerings of a skilled somatic practitioner. Feeling in our body where and how we contract and, conversely, feeling how we let go and soften, ultimately allows us to take back our right to free expression, relaxation, and well-being. It is the aim of somatic work and bodywork in particular to function as a catalyst for this type of self-discovery and liberation from historical contractions in the body.
Are you feeling the effects of stress in your body? Reach out to certified somatic coach and bodyworker Lennon Molofsky with Mindbody Somatics today to begin a journey to relief through somatic bodywork.