What Is Somatic Healing?
In this blog I hope to offer some insight on what it means to heal as it relates to the modality of somatic bodywork and coaching I offer.
Healing is not “being fixed”
We live in a culture where healing is supposed to be something that automatically happens under the care of a practitioner. For example you go to the chiropractor and they “fix” your back. There are also modalities of somatics - especially those that deal with resolving isolated traumas - in which someone might have an injury that is resolved relatively quickly without much effort or work. Sometimes the body needs to “complete” a movement in order for the trauma to be released, and in some instances this can happen in ways that are relatively quick and incredibly therapeutic. All of this is possible, but for most or many people this isn’t the type of healing they need.
Healing is usually not something spontaneous
The majority of people wanting to heal are suffering in this sense: their body is telling them there is a threat when there isn’t one, or when the threat is actually something they can tolerate once they learn how to.
Take, for example, the person who has suffered chronic abuse in childhood, as many of my clients have. The details of the abuse are less important - what’s relevant for our purposes is how their body learned to respond to the abuse. If they learned that making themselves small and quiet lessoned the chances they would experience the abuse, they likely learned to hold their breath and hold their shoulders tightly (among countless other somatic responses) as a strategy to help them avoid or minimize the level of abuse they experienced. Remember we are always organizing our bodies to get as much a sense of safety as possible, so this makes sense as a smart and intelligent strategy in childhood.
What happens next is that the body learns that this is an effective response to stress, and so this same person will likely find themselves holding and tensing under stress as an adult, even though the original context is no longer relevant. This means that as an adult, this same person will tighten their shoulders and hold their breath when under perceived duress. This tightening creates a physiological state in which it is much more difficult to express ourselves authentically and feel alive in the world. In other words, although our body’s response to threat served a useful purpose in the original context, in our present day context that same response actually increases our felt sense that something is off, or that we don’t trust ourselves, or that something bad is going to happen.
Healing requires consistently practicing a new way of being in your body
Thus, healing is really the practice of learning to notice when we contract in our bodies and then “letting go” or softening our bodies as a way to remind ourselves that we can handle the stress of the moment. Someone who is “healed” is someone who knows how they contract in their body, knows how to let it go, and is able to consistently do this under pressure so that, over time, the body learns that the present moment perceived threat is not the same as old, original threat.
Healing - at least in the context of somatic work - is usually not some spontaneous act in which a practitioner “fixes” us and we find ourselves cleared from our previous anxiety. Healing is a practice of continually reshaping our body and nervous system through daily practice. It takes time, it takes lots of practice, and it takes work. And very often it is never complete, but rather we reach a place where we can manage our anxieties and fears. Our new practices support us by helping us differentiate between our past and present. What it means when you master your healing is simply that you have truly committed to these practices.
Schedule a consultation to learn more about the process of somatic coaching.