The “Why” of Somatic Psychotherapy
BECAUSE THE BODY REMEMBERS WHAT THE MIND FORGETS
One of the pervasive myths in the fields of human experience is the division of mind and body. While this dualistic framework has been deeply entrenched in Western conceptualizations of the psyche, this is another case of reductionistic frameworks gone awry. Modern neuroscience is once again confirming what would have been intuitive to our ancestors; that the mind and body is indivisible. They co-occur in relationship with each other.
The mind is embodied. ‘Muscle memory’ isn’t limited to things like how to walk or write. Our histories are written into our physical being, and our physical coauthors our histories. Biography becomes physiology, and physiology becomes biography.
Somatic psychotherapy is a nervous-system based approach rooted in the understanding that the body stores information in many ways, including non-linguistic forms. Where as cognitive and analytical psychotherapy approaches often reveal the narrative that our analytical mind has created, somatic techniques engage and work with felt-sense, directly accessing raw, unadulterated experience.
Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Peter Levine, I utilize somatic techniques such as Somatic Experiencing, the Hakomi Method, and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, to help clients not just make sense of their experience on a cognitive level, but to reprocess it on an emotional and neurological level.
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