What is the purpose?
When healing and resolve is needed from the lingering effects of trauma, which includes physical experiences, as well as mental, emotional and energetic.
Therapy includes learning about Nervous System Regulation and how it can support more peace, balance and harmony, emotionally and physically.
Soma is the Greek word for "the living body" - this includes the living, breathing, sensing, feeling and knowing body. (Quote from Peter Levine - founder of Somatic Experiencing.)
Somatic Therapy Options might include:
Somatic Experiencing
EMDR
Talk therapy
Co-Regulating Somatic Touchwork
Psychotherapeutic Reiki
Trauma Healing Intensives
(extended sessions to work through a specific trauma/s)
Co-Regulating Touch Work is when a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner provides light touch contact over common areas of the body that store trauma.
This is provided as a choice within a Somatic Therapy session; when provided it is not separate from therapy.
Where on my body?
For example common areas are tension in muscles, the shoulders, kidneys/adrenals, joints, the feet and the head.
How:
The client is fully dressed, and can choose to lie on a massage table or remain seated in a chair.
The practitioner hand placement is still; in other words there is no massage or manipulating or moving the body.
Many Somatic Experiencing Practitioners have a massage table in their office, for Touch Work.
The Purpose:
To support nervous system regulation and completion of any piece of the trauma left unfinished, that is stuck and causing symptoms. Also, for co-regulating support so that the body can regulate and come in to settling.
For example: possibly needing to say something outloud, needing to move in a certain way to defend oneself, needing to feel or express an emotion, or needing a different way to see themselves.
The focus during Touch Work:
The focus is on how your body is experiencing stress or ease in the moment, and how that changes from moment to moment, as we support the body to find its own way 'home' to nervous system regulation.
It's both a natural remembering, a releasing, and a re-integrating of your body without those trauma signals.
During the touch practice, the practitioner and client are having a conversation, checking in and sharing current moment experience. This is less about the context of what happened, and more about the current moment sensations, images, feelings and awareness.
For example, a client might feel tension in the shoulders, and with support contact on the outside of the upper shoulders for a minute, they might notice softening.
The practitioner will ask about other channels of awareness such as "as you notice your shoulders softening, is there any emotion or image that is coming up right now?" or "as you notice that sensation changing, is there anything you begin to notice in the rest of your body?"
Sensation examples you might notice could be heat, cool, tension, a sense of flow, expansion, contraction, warmth, bubbly, hallow, tingly, numb, open, achy, racey, slow, spacey, prickly, fluid, smooth or something else.
There is no right or wrong sensation, and no agenda to "feel something" better than another thing- the idea is to welcome whatever arises, and support the body to let the thing (whatever the experience is) to continue to move through naturally, and release or integrate.
With successful trauma completion, the person usually feels more of a sense of expansion, freedom, flow and renewed connection with their deepest self, with their body, with the current moment, and with their current environment.
Copyright © 2022 - All Rights Reserved.
Victoria Ford Counseling, LLC
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.