Why Somatic Trauma Therapy Is Necessary To Heal Trauma
By Orit Krug | November 28th, 2022
Somatic Trauma Therapy is gaining popularity due to increasing research that shows how body-centered therapy is essential for healing trauma.
You might be wondering if Somatic Trauma Therapy is the right next step for you in your healing journey. Maybe you’ve been in therapy for several years but still feel disconnected in your body.
Perhaps you feel you’ve gained plenty of cognitive awareness about your trauma but you still aren’t making lasting behavioral changes.
Whatever brought you here today, and wherever you may be feeling stuck, please know that it’s not your fault.
Most therapies – even alternative ones like EMDR, EFT, and hypnotherapy – do not provide the space and tools to truly heal through your body in an effective and lasting way.
Many of my clients start working with me after 20 to 30 years of therapy, thinking that they were broken because they put in so much time and effort without experiencing the full transformation they desire.
However, once we begin working with the body and movement, they suddenly experience the shift and mind-body integration that they’ve been working for all this time.
They realize they were never broken, they just didn’t have the tools and guidance to FEEL the changes in their bodies. This is why Somatic Trauma Therapy is truly a game-changer for healing trauma.
The science behind why Somatic Trauma Therapy works
First, let’s talk about why traditional therapies aren’t enough to truly heal trauma.
The left hemisphere of our brain – the part that governs language and logic and also has the ability to understand the “sum” of any situation – tends to be the less dominant hemisphere when trauma occurs. The left hemisphere may even “shut down” during or after a traumatic event, which explains why talk therapy is often limited in helping people resolve their trauma.
Therefore, the memories and feelings associated with your trauma gets stored in your nonverbal subconscious where it doesn’t understand words. It never stored the trauma memories in words. Instead, the trauma gets stored in fragments of sensations, which means that a “random” smell, touch, or sound can instantly trigger unresolved trauma from the past.
These reactions in your body happen instantly to any faint reminder of your past. For instance, let’s say you’re walking down the street and smell a rosemary-baked chicken from a restaurant. This is the exact type of chicken that your mother used to make to reconcile with your father after he abused her again. Even if you were having the BEST day – even if it has been 25 years since the trauma occurred – the subtle smell of this chicken abruptly sends you into an intense flashback and out of commission for a whole week.
These reactions in your body are not in your control. They automatically happen without thinking about it, just like breathing and digesting.
This is why we need to access different parts of your brain through Somatic Trauma Therapy, where you can actually release old trauma, and become in COMMAND of your responses instead of your nervous system hijacking your behaviors.
Healing trauma through the non-verbal parts of the brain
To further understand why Somatic Trauma Therapy is necessary to truly heal trauma, we need to understand how each part of the brain responds to traditional and somatic types of therapy.
Let’s dive deeper into the different parts of your brain and what needs to happen in order to truly rewire your nervous system:
- Prefrontal Cortex
When we are in talk therapy, we are accessing the Prefrontal Cortex. This is the part that absorbs and processes verbal language and ALSO goes offline when we experience trauma. So when you engage this part of your brain to try to heal trauma, you’re only accessing a very, very small fragment of what has actually happened to you in the past.
This is why traditional therapies and couples counseling aren’t enough to heal trauma. Leaders in the trauma field – Bessel van der Kolk, Pat Ogden, and Peter Levine – have done extensive neurophysiological research and brain imaging that show how trauma memories are stored non-verbally. They all reinforce that embodied therapies are the most effective approach to process and move past trauma.
- Amygdala
The Amygdala is the part of your brain that is your fear center that controls and activates your fight and flight responses.
The Amygdala is the part of your brain that stores most of your trauma in fragments of sensations of touch and smell, and all the senses. Research shows that the Amygdala is hyperactive in trauma survivors and that in order to heal from trauma, your body needs to process past triggers and reduce their intensity. Your body also needs to learn new pleasurable experiences in a safe environment.
When we try to think or talk about our trauma in therapy, or journal, or repeat affirmations, we cannot truly access the non-verbal memories stored by the Amygdala.
- Hippocampus
The Hippocampus is the part of the brain that distinguishes between past and present memories. For instance, if your partner gets frustrated with you today, your brain and body literally cannot separate your healthy partner expressing a normal amount of frustration, from your abusive father who often got violently angry with you. This can make it feel like our trauma’s happening to us over and over and over again, and push away partners who are actually safe, healthy, and loving.
Talking about the past doesn’t actually reduce the intensity of the triggers of our trauma today because it does not access the Hippocampus. In fact, talking about every detail of your trauma reinforces negative patterns from the past instead of actively training your nervous system to tolerate and release them.
A client of mine recently said that all the years she spent in therapy talking about her issues just traumatized her more. She went week after week, talking through all the details of her past, stirring up those difficult memories, without ever actually releasing them from her brain & body. As a result, these memories became intensified and either pushed back down into a depression, or heightened to more anxiety and panic attacks.
Why Somatic Dance/Movement Therapy works best to heal trauma
As we’ve learned in this blog post, traditional therapy is not enough to access the non-verbal parts of our brain.
We need to access the nonverbal brain directly, and the way that we can do that, in order to change your primal responses, is through your body.
And the language of the body is MOVEMENT.
Dr. Bruce Perry, a leading expert in the field of trauma, even said, “Nothing grows the brain better than movement.”
It’s crucial to use intentional movement to break old patterns that stem from trauma, because movement is the vehicle for which we express ourselves and communicate in relationships.
In my couples therapy work, we don’t do that much talking, which is all left-brain (prefrontal cortex) processing. I guide my clients to communicate nonverbally through movement.
For example, in one couple’s session, I had the partners explore physically moving further away and closer together. For both partners, in their day-to-day life, it felt detrimental when they wanted time and space away from each other. They felt guilty for wanting more independence, so they abandoned their own needs to try to match each other. This led to deep unfulfillment within themselves and hopelessness about the relationship as a whole. But when they moved further away from each other in the safety of our session, they realized it wasn’t detrimental at all. My client said:
“Looking back, our conflicts weren’t really disasters. It was us looking through a screen colored by past trauma. Once we healed the way we were physically reacting to each other, it changed everything for us in a way that nothing else ever had.”
Because this couple had physical experiences of moving away from each other, and realizing it wasn’t as horrible as they imagined, it gave them the embodied experience that it was safe to be more independent. Plus, we explored different ways they could choose to come back together.
They especially loved slowly walking back towards each other and brushing up against each other’s shoulders. Even six months after they finished the program, they told me they still do this particular movement which makes them laugh and feel more playful together.
Plus, it’s really empowering to feel in command of your body and choose how you want to connect to your partner instead of being on autopilot and going through the same old motions that don’t spark excitement anymore.
Of course, this process looks different for every couple and individual because each person brings different traumas and fears to the relationship. The couple I just mentioned clearly brought in some trauma and belief that independence in a relationship meant abandonment and failure. They had to learn a new way, and the years of traditional couples therapy, coaching and conflict resolution exercises didn’t quite hit the mark in the way they needed.
You deserve to heal your trauma & find peace in your body.
The latest trauma research shows that cognitive-based therapies cannot fully access trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body. Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain-Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal trauma from the physical body or nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for many people. They end up feeling stuck, even after spending decades of therapy and gaining so much self-awareness.
If you relate, you might’ve considered giving up on your healing. You might wonder if a fully integrated healing is not possible for you.
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing deeply & wholly, because we all have neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection to love, joy, and openness.
But even with an effective neuroscience-backed Somatic approach, going to weekly sessions could still require many more months or years until you feel that “click” in your body that finally makes you feel WHOLE.
That’s why I run Somatic Trauma Healing Retreats where many people experience accelerated, integrated, and lasting healing in just a few days.
(Disclaimer: each attendee must go through an application process that ensures this accelerated healing is possible for them).
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, I’d love to invite you to check out my retreats! There are several options from women’s healing, plant-assisted, 1:1, and more.
