Sick of talk-based therapy? You can access your emotional material through your body

Before I launch into the merits of body-based emotional therapy, I want to give credit to traditional psychotherapy for all the benefits it provides. Psychotherapy supports self-reflection and self-awareness. It can empower people with tools to make better choices and improve the quality of their relationships. In it’s best form, the therapist provides a safe container for the client to work through his/her relationship wounds.

If you have a therapist you trust and you are growing through that relationship, wonderful, carry on. If feel you have bumped up against the limit of how psychotherapy can help you, read on. Many of us continue to be triggered by the same stimuli. We are trapped into the same type of reactions even when we intend to react differently. When we aren’t too stressed we may be able to execute our ‘best behaviour’ reactions but when we are taxed, the old wounded patterns come through.

That’s why a mom who was screamed at as a child ends up screaming at her children, even though she doesn’t want to. She may be trying so hard to be a calmer mother and succeeding in certain moments but in her body, screaming is what’s known. She can retell the story of what happened in her childhood one hundred times and gain more awareness of the triggers but the primary wound still persists within her tissue.

Somatic therapy uses breath and presence to help clients learn to land peacefully within themselves. It sounds simple but along the way, we encounter the wounds, which show up as blockages or pain in the body. In this example, that mom would likely encounter the pain of her child-self being screamed at by her own mother and have to untangle that impact in order to free her to consistently act differently with own children.