I am a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), trained in a somatic (body-focused) awareness approach to healing from trauma. Trauma is different from PTSD. Even without a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, we might still flinch at the sound of a loud noise or feel sick to our stomachs when we think about a specific event. Or, we might feel nervous or stressed talking to an authority figure or when advocating for ourselves. These responses often come from difficult or traumatic experiences in our past. If this sounds like you, a Somatic Experiencing approach might be just what you need.
Knowing ourselves comes from knowing not just our minds but our bodies and emotions too. Often we shut ourselves off from our emotions because they are too painful to bear or acting on them doesn’t make our lives better. The difficulty with this is that we are cutting ourselves off from our own selves!
In Somatic Experiencing we build tolerance for experiencing emotion safely without overwhelming our system.
Avoiding emotions does not make them leave. It sends them “underground” and results in many psychological disorders such as anxiety and depression. It can also lead to personality disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. In Somatic Experiencing we build tolerance for experiencing emotion safely without overwhelming our system. This allows us to become more connected to ourselves.
Wouldn’t it be great to experience reality in a deeper way? To be connected to your body and emotions? What if I told you you could tolerate these emotions and even feel peaceful acceptance of them? Maybe you sometimes feel disconnected from your emotions or body sensations. Or maybe you go from being “in your head” to experiencing emotions and shutting them down by distracting yourself with gaming, TV, your phone, alcohol or drugs. Maybe you aren’t sure if you agree with the “trust your gut” or “go with your heart” messages you’ve heard. If this describes you, read on.
Cliché emotional messages in movies, songs, popular media, and social media constantly inundate us. These messages tell us to “follow our heart” and “trust ourselves”. While there are reasons to be cynical about making these sayings personal rules to follow (I’ll get to that later), there is also a lot of scientific truth behind them.
In English, we have some slightly muddled language surrounding emotions that does not properly express how emotions actually operate inside us. For one, we have phrases like “I think I’m feeling X” and “I feel sad in my head”. Both of these sentences are inaccurate because emotions don’t act on our thoughts or occur solely in our brains. Instead, emotions are run by our neuro-endocrine system. This means they exist in our whole body, not just our brain. They evolved to operate on our body and not our mind. This is why it is more accurate to say emotions are embodied. That is, we notice emotions in our mind because of their impact on our body.
We must identify the sensations we notice. Where are they, and what do they feel like? This is called somatic awareness.
So, the quickest and most accurate way to identify the actual emotions going on inside us is to go straight to the body. We must identify the sensations we notice. Where are they, and what do they feel like? This is called somatic awareness. We identify what we feel and where we feel it so we can distinguish anger from disgust and sadness from depression, and so on. We can then use our heads—our minds—to make a more informed decision based on what we are feeling. This allows us to use logic and reasoning to make better decisions for ourselves.
Emotions are “packages” of responses that are faster than our thoughts. They allow us to respond more quickly to our environment. For example, fear gives us automatic responses that are measured in microseconds. These responses evolved to save our lives in an emergency. Thinking through the danger we sense and making a rational decision would take seconds that we could not afford to spare.
Because emotions give us “real-time” responses to what is happening to us, when we listen to them we can live more in the moment. This is much more emotionally healthy than being “stuck in our head”, trying to think through things when we could be more spontaneous and automatic. (Of course, we need to think through some emotions, depending on the context.)
Because emotions are embodied, it is through somatic awareness that we gain access to the information our emotions tell us. This awareness leads to making better decisions that take our feelings into consideration. A beginner step in somatic awareness involves a mindfulness-like exercise of slowing down and tracking what and where you feel sensations while you respond to an experience. Then, you will follow those sensations, open to them changing and moving into different parts of your body.
Allowing unpleasant emotions to “be” is the quickest way through them.
What is most important in this process is a non-judgemental attitude. Feel the sensation, know that it might change or it might not, and then give it time and see what it does. This is hard to do when the emotion is negative (fear, sadness, or anger). But, allowing unpleasant emotions to “be” is the quickest way through them. If you can feel an emotion directly and invite it to change, you will transition to a new emotion more quickly and less painfully than if you try to dictate to yourself what you must feel. Besides, we can’t dictate what we feel anyway, and attempts to do so ultimately lead to varying levels of disappointment.
It’s not about “following our heart” and assuming that our feelings are truth (very often they aren’t). It’s about taking the information from our feelings into consideration. The reason this is important is that feelings are the main motivators behind why we do things. So, being in touch with them helps us act more in tune with our values and desires. If we act contrary to our emotions, we feel uneasy and second guess ourselves. We have lowered confidence in our own words and actions. If we understand what we are feeling by paying attention to how our feelings manifest in our body, then we can make emotion-informed decisions (including very logical ones). This process is likely to increase the accuracy and “rightness” of our decisions in the context of our life and situation.
Krister Temme is a Registered Psychologist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), trained in a somatic (body-focused) awareness approach to healing from trauma.