Draw your attention to your jaw as you read this. Are you acquainted with a sense? Are there areas of stress? Does your jaw feel tight or relaxed?
Now imagine releasing any tension. How wouldn’t it feel?
Next, bring your awareness back to your breath and return to this subject.
This may sound familiar. You can have previously scanned areas of your body, checking where you’re holding tension and asking to see in case you can release it.
This is only one example of how to lift awareness of the mind and body – and the connection between the 2. Such exercises include recognizing physical sensations, how your body is feeling, what it’s feeling, and even exploring the psychological-physical connection.
As you scan your body, you could notice emotions – perhaps anxiety, stress or sadness – that arise in relation to physical stress.
The idea of ​​this connection is behind what is known as “somatic therapy.”
Focus on the mind-body connection
Somatic therapies (from the Greek word for body – ) give attention to the connection. Between mind and bodywhich makes it different from other psychological treatments.
More traditional mental health approaches, akin to cognitive-behavioral therapy, increase awareness of the mind and its relationship to behavior. They often use conversation to explore the mind, its emotions and thoughts, and encourage people to acknowledge and take care of negative thought and behavior patterns.
Somatic therapies, in contrast, privilege the body. These are therapeutic approaches based on the understanding that physical and psychological connections exist, and that emotions and psychological experiences can manifest and be expressed as physical sensations.
But somatic therapies transcend understanding that emotions like stress can affect physical health. Instead, persons are guided to bring awareness to their body and the way emotions are experienced as physical sensations within the body – then explore how this will be released through physical means.
What does it appear to be?
Consider the strain in a single's jaw identified in an awareness exercise akin to the one in the beginning of this text. Somatic therapies may also help people safely explore the emotions of feelings, or the connection to a traumatic experience. Then, through respiratory or similar exercises Body movement activities akin to stretching, posture adjustments and even jumping, People release stress..
Somatic or Mind-body treatments Used by a wide range of healthcare and mental health professionals, typically within the treatment of tension and traumatic experiences and conditions, e.g. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
However, these are still alternative treatments Limited research evidence To reveal clinical effectiveness. Much of the evidence on this emerging field pertains to a selected sort of somatic therapy called “Somatic experience“
A hard and fast perspective
Developed by Somatic Experience American psychotherapist Peter Levine over several a long time. This is described As “bottom-up processing” that directs the client's attention:
Primarily for visceral sensations, each visceral (interoception) and musculo-skeletal (proprioception and kinesthesis), fairly than cognitive or emotional experiences.
These physical sensations are seen as manifestations of post-traumatic stress experiences, which accumulate within the body on the neurological level.Body memoryLevine theorizes that this incomplete acute stress response (when someone gets stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode) can result in ongoing dysregulation of the body's stress and rest systems.
But people can learn to acknowledge and release this stored trauma. According to Practitioners Techniques may also help people release, heal and grow to be more resilient.
Painful memories are step by step targeted. Development of maximum tolerance For unpleasant sensations and their relation to emotions.
During a series of sessions, clients are taken through a step-by-step model to develop awareness of physical sensations related to a traumatic event or cumulative stress, learn to tolerate the difficult feeling, after which Release it.
A 2020 Literature review Preliminary but promising somatic testing studies indicate that it could be effective in reducing traumatic stress and as a treatment for PTSD. The authors concluded that more randomized and controlled studies were needed.
But could it give you the results you want?
The effectiveness of psychotherapies often will depend on the participant's connection and engagement with theory and practice. What works for some may not work for others. Somatic therapy, with its unique give attention to the mind-body connection, could also be an alternate therapy that folks will probably want to explore.
Preliminary evidence and Personal stories Show some positive results. However, somatic therapy doesn’t yet have conclusive research evidence to prove its effectiveness.
As at all times, seek the advice of your health skilled and get reliable information and health advice.