What are body-based approaches in psychotherapy?
Lately more and more emphasis has been put on using body-based approaches in psychotherapy over more traditional talk therapy and cognitive models. These approaches can be used on their own and also combined with talk therapy approaches. But understanding exactly what body-based therapy means can be difficult for new clients.
Body-based psychotherapy approaches (also often referred to as somatic therapy approaches) refers to a general branch of therapy that focuses on the interactions of the mind and body. Many proponents of this branch of therapy believe that in order to facilitate change and resilience in a person our emotional experience in our body has to be considered and, in some cases, may be the way forward for creating change. We often don’t think about how our emotions are firstly physiological reactions in our body before our cognitive brain make sense of what that physiological reaction may mean. For example, we first feel the sensations of our chest feeling heavy and feeling teary in our eyes, and then only once those physiological sensations show up do we translate that experience in our cognitive brain to understand that we are feeling sad.
Body-based approaches focuses on engaging the felt-sense – the experiences of our sensori-motor states. We may often see body-based/somatic referenced a lot in regards to treating trauma, however this approach can be beneficial in any area of difficulty that involves our emotional experience. One of the most common forms of body-based approaches is Somatic Experiencing (SE).
A Somatic Experiencing approach specifically takes the lens that our nervous system is always responding and reacting with the flight-fight-freeze responses to any activating element of our day – whether that be feeling a bit agitated by an argument at work or bigger sources of activation such as dealing with very traumatic events. Our nervous system is always responding to protect us, however, we often can get stuck in patterns of fight, flight, and immobility (“freeze” responses) in our life where we feel we may always be stuck in protection mode, whether that be feeling anxious, feeling angry, feeling stuck (and more). In these circumstances, we can understand how being stuck in constant modes of protection can feel more disruptive to our lives than helpful.
Somatic Experiencing helps the nervous system to increase its capacity for this regulation based on helping the person to learn how the nervous system is open to the best capacity for regulation and change when we help it find resourced states during this dysregulation pattern – meaning we help the client to build a felt sense of safety in the body. This goes beyond just thinking of a safe place – it means helping the person to learn what feeling safety in the body feels like in the here and now and how that feeling of safety calms dysregulation in the nervous system. The goal of Somatic Experiencing is to slowly and safely recognize and how dysregulation and activation shows up in the sensori-motor states of the body and how this state of dysregulation can be deactivated by engaging sensori-motor states of felt safety in the body. Meaning the ongoing, distressing physical and emotional reactions that happen when dysregulation is triggered can be calmed when we help a person increase their capacity to understand how they can feel safety in their body. Somatic Experiencing also integrates research on the Polyvagal Therapy (Steven Porges) research on trauma and attachment issues (Alan Schore) to help better connect in with the neurophysiological processes of what creates felt safety in the nervous system.
Because Somatic Experiencing relies on the felt sense, it can be difficult for new clients to understand how this approach really feels in action. Here are some great resources that also help explain this:
What does a typical Somatic Experiencing session look like? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYHCgOK0_wA
What is SOMATIC EXPERIENCING in Trauma Therapy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDYRkLAAH2U