This could help you take your mind off past events that are causing you distress. Grounding exercises help you center and anchor yourself to the present moment. Another 2017 study in 91 people living with lower back pain and PTSD suggests that a brief somatic experience (in addition to other treatments) may lessen back pain and relieve some PTSD symptoms.A 2017 study in 63 people found that somatic experiencing helped relieve symptoms of PTSD and depression.This can help you manage some of your most distressing symptoms.Įmerging research suggests that somatic therapy can be effective for people who’ve experienced trauma: One of the main goals of somatic experiencing is to develop a body/mind connection and increase your ability to regulate your emotions. This could lead to symptoms of chronic stress, in addition to those linked to trauma. Somatic experiencing also helps you realize if you’ve been “stuck” in the fight, flight, or freeze response. “Somatic work offers the body time and space to complete whatever it needed to do at the time that it didn’t get to do.” In some cases, talking about trauma without adequate support, or with a therapist that isn’t trained in trauma, may retraumatize you, according to Candela Brower. “The body does not digest what has happened and instead, we stuff our feelings, numb out, or deny reality.” “It’s like eating a big meal and not fully digesting it, but then eating another big meal, and then another,” Candela Brower explains. Trauma is “when too much happens too soon for the nervous system to process,” says Valerie Candela Brower, a licensed professional counselor and certified somatic experiencing practitioner in Southbury, Connecticut. When you practice these body-focused exercises, you focus on physical sensations, instead of thoughts and emotions as you’d do in talk therapy, or your fears as you’d do with exposure therapy. Somatic experiencing may allow you to revisit trauma without recalling specific events and emotions. It was conceptualized as an alternative to other trauma-focused therapies - which, although effective for some people, didn’t work for everyone. Somatic therapy, aka somatic experiencing, was originally developed by Peter Levine in the late 1970s. Somatic therapy is a body-focused approach that may be particularly helpful if you have symptoms of chronic stress or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There are a few therapeutic approaches for healing from trauma.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |