Somatic Therapy /
Trauma-Conscious Embodied Healing
The body comes to therapy, too.
Mind-body practices allow healing to occur in real time, which is something that traditional talk therapy doesn’t necessarily offer.
Embodied healing is about cultivating a sense of safety and security in your mind and body.
With somatic tools and techniques
that guide you to profound awareness of your inner Self,
you’ll develop a deeper trust in your ability
to work with your own nervous system responses,
and honor your ‘felt’ experiences as you move toward
feeling more calm, more often.
Ready to deepen your mind-body connection?
Book a free 20-minute consultation appointment now to learn more about how embodied healing practices can illuminate your inner strength and help you feel more empowered in your trauma recovery.
Trauma & Grief
Trauma and grief share interconnected ‘symptoms’ of traumatic responses that are experienced through intense feelings of detachment from the body.
Our nervous systems are directly tied to our emotions, stress, and breathing. The autonomic nervous system is composed of the sympathetic “fight-or-flight” activation, and parasympathetic “rest and digest” calming sensations.
When faced with real or perceived fears or threats to safety and security, your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) automatically reacts with a trauma/stress response (“fight-or-flight”).
This activated SNS response prepares you for survival from threat through a physiological response of increased stress hormones. These hormones and increased heart rate stimulate (and sometimes overwhelm) your body to take action, but leave you feeling bombarded with a cycle of anxiety, panic, or dread.
Research shows that trauma get trapped as stored energy in the physical body, and the fight-or-flight response becomes habitually over-active. Although your body is attempting to protect itself, it can feel like it is turning against you through unpleasant experiences of hyper-vigilance, irritability, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, and/or disassociation. Over time, the over-activated SNS can lead to poor health conditions such as IBS, chronic fatigue, insomnia, etc., and potentially be the catalyst for increased destructive behaviors such as substance use or self-inflicted harm.
But, there is good news! Once your mind and body believe you are safe, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) brings you back to feeling more relaxed. When the PNS is engaged, your heart rate decreases, your breathing slows, and your anxiety diminishes.
Embodied Healing
Our bodies are the containers for all of our feelings and sensations.
When focusing on recovery and healing from trauma and/or grief, it’s really important to first learn how to cultivate and feel a sense of internal security within your own body.
Trauma-conscious embodied healing is an integrative mind-body practice offered at Hearts for Hope Therapy that is specifically designed around safety and security. This specialized, somatic approach to trauma healing takes into account the profound imprints that trauma has on the body.
Because trauma lives in the body, mindful movement, meditation, and somatic tools combined with intentional breathing techniques can amplify your awareness of and connection to the parts of your body that feel stuck, anxious, or tense. These areas can be an indication of where the trauma lives, and are the exact areas where healing needs to occur.
Embodied healing techniques will teach you how to intentionally use the parasympathetic nervous system to calm your body and mind, and therefore bring yourself out of the fight-of-flight trauma response more quickly.
By deepening awareness of the connection between physiological, cognitive, and emotional experiences that show up in the body in the present moment, you learn how to accept all emotions as inner guides.
This will allow you to unravel unhelpful or painful stories and negative core beliefs that you may have previously attached to yourself as a result of your traumatic experiences.
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Here’s another way to think about it… Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), an effective form of talk therapy, may help you learn how to restructure unhelpful thought patterns in your mind, but Embodied Healing practices help you feel better as you learn how to restructure and release the physiological impact that trauma and/or grief has on the body.
Somatic Therapy
The word somatic is derived from the Greek word “soma” which means “living body.”
Somatic awareness is gained through developing a more complete connection with your body’s experience in the present moment.
Through specific somatic tools and techniques that give your body a ‘felt’ awareness of physical sensation that is attached to emotions, you’ll begin to notice and unwind the stored traumatic experiences in your body that block you from being in the present lived moment.
A somatic approach to therapy will teach you how to be in harmony with your nervous system, so that you become empowered with a newfound sense of control and trust in your body’s ability to move away from the over-active ‘fight-or-flight’ response in order to feel calm, safe, and secure.
HeARTS for Hope Therapy weaves many somatic techniques into therapeutic offerings, such as:
Mindfulness
Tracking physical & emotional sensations
Pendulation (moving between ‘felt’ senses)
Breath-work
Guided meditations
Trauma-Conscious Yoga
Yin / Restorative, Yoga Nidra, & Mindful Vinyasa
Progressive muscle relaxation
EMDR bilateral stimulation
With ongoing practice of somatic and embodied healing techniques, you will reclaim your sense of security and comfort within your own body and release stored traumatic energies. You will recognize how to respond versus react to your nervous system activations, and you’ll begin to notice your hyper-vigilance, anxiety, sleep troubles, and/or flashbacks are happening less frequently.
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
- Carl Jung
Ready to deepen your mind-body connection?
Book a free 20-minute consultation appointment now to learn more about how embodied healing practices can illuminate your inner strength and help you feel more empowered in your trauma recovery.