Somatic Therapy & Healing - Everyone´s Confused

Trauma Informed Somatic Therapist & Founder of ISOHH - Aimee Rai

"Without certain foundations in place, those “wow” moments of release can feel dramatic, but fleeting — like therapeutic fast food at best, and completely destabilising at worst."

Somatic therapy has gone viral. From “nervous system regulation” reels and body based healing quick tricks, to coaches promising deep transformation with various somatic hacks - everyone’s talking about working with the body.

And that’s exciting - because it means we’re finally moving beyond the idea that healing can arise through purely cognitive experience - we are coming to see that we cannot think our individual and collective way out of the pickle we find ourselves in. And, rightly used in right context, a good in right context can be magic.

But, after fifteen years as a therapist specialising in trauma and somatic approaches to healing, wellbeing and spiritual practice, there is also something I can see about this movement that concerns me:

Much of what is being shared online misses the heart of what somatic therapy actually is - and what it takes to make it work. 

Breathwork, movement, grounding, regulating & body based trauma release techniques are valuable tools - I have been teaching and working with them all for more than 15 years - long before they became fashionable. But if we use these practices as a new way to feel in control of the body and emotions, to simply subdue them, then the trauma has snuck in the back door. Most of us are using this stuff as just another way to try and keep the lid on. Its all part of what I call the dehumanising pursuit of “pathological wellness” that we’ve been sold.

Real somatic work is about building a relationship with the body and what we find alive inside.

If we use these tools to suppress our discomfort instead of understanding it, we’re not healing — we are still trying to "fix" something we believe to be wrong with us. We haven’t yet been supported to listen to the wisdom of symptoms and emotional currents and let them teach and lead us. These tools are meant to expand what we call our "window of tolerance" so that it becomes more possible to explore why they are there and what they are saying. If we are hoping a little nervous system regulation, parts practice or breathwork (however powerful) will mean we can duck out of long term relational therapy or getting more intimate with our own sticky, tricky, psychology and personal pain …  we´d be mistaken.

These techniques are often a vital missing piece in the process for many of us - but they are not a stand alone solution, they don't allow us to avoid the inner work and necessary psychological explorations we each must do - they support us to do that work more safely.

Another of the biggest risks of the “DIY somatics” movement, is speed. And I say DIY, but to be frank there seem to be plenty of practitioners willing to dive in head first with clients, all too happy to try out their new therapy "trick" without considering the risks involved or the true readiness of the client to meet what might arise. I have been that practitioner at times in earlier years. It often comes from a very sincere place to help, or from anxiety that as the practitioner, we don’t know what else to do. So I am not shaming, just naming. I have dealt with many clients over many years traumatised by their trauma therapy - invited to engage in techniques too fast too soon, that were touted to be a magical solution of sorts, which actually only served to pop open a “pandoras box” they simply were not ready look in.

In good trauma informed somatic therapy, there’s a principle called titration - often cited by Peter Levine. Titration means to gently dip in and out of themes, sensations and memories, so that the nervous system can expand its capacity to tolerate these things safely. This is another reason why co-regulation and professional support are essential. Without a safe relational container and someone providing loving limits rooted in their professional expertise, we often push too hard too fast and instead of healing, we just re-open wounds and leave the nervous system raw and over-worked.

The trauma itself makes us want to rush – partly because we are in a hurry to fix what we perceive to be wrong with us, but also because if the nervous system is stuck in dorsal vagal states of numbness, we often want to push for extremes of experience so that we can feel something, and if we are more prone to adrenal sympathetic nervous system states, then we can be addicted to an endless need to feel the rush of the hormonal cascade that comes with strong emotional release.

In reality, slow is not just safer and its also faster and more effective.

Somatic work can feel powerful — cathartic, emotional, transformative. But intensity isn’t the same as depth, and big feelings don’t necessarily equate to big healing or long term shift. Often the real healing happens in the invisible relational moments quietly accumulated over years of therapeutic exchange.

That’s said, big feelings are always welcome in my spaces, we absolutely want to arrive at a place where we are allowed to be and feel all the things. I am not overwhelmed by my clients - I have spent decades making friends with all facets of my own inner world (and continue to) so I am not intimidated by the storms and strong currents a client may bring in to the space – I can only calmly meet in another that which I can calmly meet in myself. But - my job is to also make sure they do not become overwhelmed by themselves or the strength of the forces that may move through them. I do that partly by providing the ground of my own nervous system - through co-regulation we create invisible safety in the space in a manner that was almost never provided when we were young. But equally, before even considering engaging with advanced somatic or trauma resolution modalities like EMDR, parts work, or somatic experiencing style processing, there are many skills we need to help our clients build, such as interoceptive capacity — the ability to feel what we feel and come in to safe and steady relationship with it. As Bessel van der Kolk says, interoception heals trauma. You can’t integrate what you can’t feel and you have to be able to "name it to tame it" as neurobiologist Dan Siegal likes to say.

Without certain foundations in place, those “wow” moments of release can feel dramatic, but fleeting — like therapeutic fast food at best, and completely destabilising at worst.

Above all, healing is always relational — because the wound is always relational. Most of our deepest wounds were formed in moments when we needed connection and it wasn’t available. We know statistically that even PTSD tends to only take root in those not able to access sufficient emotionally healthy support post incident - no matter how horrific the experience itself may have been. That’s why healing cannot happen in isolation. It cant be an exclusively DIY adventure. There is much we can learn alone, but there comes a time that without the support of a safe skilled other, we will hit an invisible block in the road. There is only so far that some tapping, TRE, Sunday morning mushroom rituals, home yoga and good self books will take us.

Somatic therapy, at its core, is relational work – it is healing the body´s memory that we were alone and unsafe, or even more specifically, the body´s belief that others are unsafe. This is the core wound most of us carry whether or not we have met it directly yet. It concerns me enormously how many people are employing trauma resolution techniques to themselves without support or skilled guidance - although I understand why. It also concerns me how often people enter into a therapeutic space and are immediately thrown in to intensive process by the practitioner they are trusting - offered little time to build a safe relational foundation with this stranger and offered little time between processing for dialogue and integration.

Sometimes this will "work" in the sense that the novel techniques may seem to provide a sense of potent catharsis or sudden insight - but the shadow is that it can create psychological stacking where a huge amount of energetic and emotional debris is being stirred and not fully processed. It also denies us the vital relational experience that offers a far more potent medicine long term. Its too transactional, too mechanical. The therapist’s steady, attuned presence is what allows the nervous system to soften, to re-learn safety.

Healing happens not when we self-regulate perfectly, but when we finally feel safe enough to be messy, confused, afraid, distressed and dysregulated in the company of another who themselves is regulated and emotionally well enough to be able to compassionately hold that with us, - when the emotional isolation and terror of connection is finally ruptured.

In my experience the only people who ever question this are those who have not yet had the privilege and the opportunity to sit with another safe human being consistently week in week out through the trials, tribulations and victories of life for months and years on end. To have someone in your corner like that, someone who really knows you, sees you (sometimes perhaps better than you see yourself) is terrifying, beautiful, essential, and changes you in ways that nothing else can.

There´s a growing belief that talk therapy doesn’t work. This is particularly pushed by those wanting to market a somatic narrative. They are wrong. And I am saying that as someone who specialises in somatics and is here offering a counselling training rooted in trauma and somatic theory and practice. It is not talk therapy - human dialogue - that hasn’t worked – it is the clinical paradigm that hasn’t worked. There’s a difference.

Why hasn’t it worked? Because it got dried out, rigidified and fridgidified, bled of its humanity, bled of its soul. The clinical paradigm is full of amazing whole hearted human beings who have been trained out of love, away from instinct and in to stiffness in the name of healing. Healing became a science (in the worst sense) and a forgotten art. all in the space of a hundred industrialised and politicised years. We forgot how to relate to one another, how to sit human to human, heart to heart and let the healing happen.

Embodiment - somatic therapy - isn’t about replacing talk therapy with “doing” things with the body. The danger of that is that it becomes just as mechanistic and soulless. I have seen this in action. It doesn’t work either. I have heard of clients not being allowed to talk in parts therapy sessions or being forced "back to the body" in somatic processing style spaces. This is madness. The mind and body are one singular system - not parts to be separated or segregated.

If we now reject the power of the mind to help us make sense of what we find in the body we will get more lost than ever before - flooded by meaningless sensation, drowning in an ocean of emotional experience. Real somatic therapy is about bringing the body back into the conversation, back in to the space. Its about both parties, client and practitioner, coming back in to the body and moving from there, sharing from there, with the wise mind as witness, guide and companion on the path.

This is not my opinion alone. Statistics consistently show that therapeutic rapport, not technique, is the number-one predictor of positive outcomes. Read that again! Statistics consistently show that therapeutic rapport, not technique, is the number-one predictor of positive outcomes. That means that to some extent it doesn’t matter what techniques we employ as a therapist if our capacity to sit and relate to our clients and offer them a secure attachment experience and genuine warmth are absent. Does that mean we shouldn’t learn the tools or techniques? Of course not. Somatic approaches are unquestionably fuel for the therapeutic fire – but they need a relational crucible for real alchemy to arise.

Talk therapy that’s dry and disconnected, doesn’t work. But human, relational exchange that is rooted in the body, supported by somatic technique, and good psychological understanding, creates a kind of healing that has become a long lost art.

All my love

Although there are a number of practitioner trainings coming to market offering similar bones - the basics of nervous system regulation and trauma processing - here at ISOHH© our training was and is the first and only of its kind to accompany these powerful and vital teachings and techniques, with the core trauma informed, foundational, relational, and somatically oriented counselling and therapeutic skills that create the real flesh and nuance of safe skilled therapeutic work.

If you’re looking for a training and a ready for a path that treats your development as a practitioner and your evolution as a human being as equally vital — this is the work that we do on our Trauma Informed Somatic Counselling Professional Training Externally Accredited by the ACCPH, and we’d love to have you with us.

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