Homework Week Six:

Reading! Woop woop!

Somatic therapy is a form of body-centered therapy that looks at the connection of mind and body and uses both psychotherapy and physical therapies for holistic healing. Our grounding, centering and awareness exercises all stem from somatic therapy. In addition to talk therapy, somatic therapy practitioners use mind-body exercises and other physical techniques to help release the pent-up tension that is negatively affecting your physical and emotional wellbeing. Somatic therapy can help people who suffer from stress, anxiety, depression, grief, addiction, problems with relationships, and sexual function, as well as issues related to trauma and abuse. The theory behind somatic therapy is that the mind, body, spirit, and emotions are all related and connected to each other. 

What is mindfulness? What is it that makes mindfulness good for us, and in what way?

I have had the pleasure of working at InsightLA, a meditation training and teaching center founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction). Dr. Kabat-Zinn is the founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at UMass Medical School, has proposed “Mindfulness,” he says, “means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” “Instead of losing our minds just when we need them most, with the help of mindfulness we can integrate all the dimensions of our experience— emotional, somatic, cognitive and social.”

In other words, mindfulness can be defined as our ability to override the default mode of impulsively reacting to events from a fight-or-flight mode. Having access to all the dimensions of our experience, and integrating them, allows us to see whether or not the situation is as threatening as it first appears to be. This gives us the power to react in a way that is appropriate to the present moment.

We could say mindfulness is the process of shifting from a reactive mode to a proactive one. We move past reactivity (sympathetic activation) through self-regulation that uses awareness of body as a gateway to the experience of self-awareness.

By Soph Sam Davis, Ph.D. 

https://psychcentral.com

For many people who have experienced trauma, practicing mindfulness can bring up painful and overwhelming emotions that they don’t necessarily have the resources to deal with. The focused attention of mindfulness can send a traumatized person into a state of heightened emotional arousal, which can be disorienting and even trigger dissociation. Whether it’s from a single traumatic event, or from physical or emotional needs having been consistently not attuned to or abused, trauma leaves a lasting imprint on our physiology. Essentially, it means we are unable to regulate our nervous systems out of a state of emotional distress. 

But mindfulness also has the potential to help build exactly the things that are useful in recovering from trauma: self-compassion, being in the present moment, and being able to self-regulate, and mindfulness definitely does have the potential to help ease PTSD symptoms. As David Treleaven has argued, we need trauma-sensitive approaches to mindfulness meditation. 

Enter: the body. Paying attention to body sensations is a classic element of mindfulness, but it is particularly vital to strengthen this element in the beginning in the case of trauma. Somatic mindfulness can be a way to increase our capacity for regulating the nervous system, forming an excellent bridge to becoming more present and connected, and allowing us to start discharging the shock states that we’ve been unconsciously held in.

Trauma, Mind, and Body

Addressing the physical experience of an emotion is a powerful way to work “bottom-up” to change the cognitive associations of an emotional state. The past few decades of neuroscience research has revealed some of how the brain behaves related to fear and trauma, as well as how this affects our physiological and emotional states, and is in turn influenced by those physiological states. This is a complex feedback system, and it therefore makes sense to try to work both “bottom-up” with bodily experience, as well as “top-down”, noticing our fixed beliefs about ourselves and others, our self-hatred, self-rejections and judgements. 

Traumatized people tend to disconnect from the body by numbing bodily experience or becoming overly cognitive. One way to think about this disconnection is that when we’ve been in a situation where we were threatened or where our core needs were not met, the sympathetic branch of our nervous systems gets activated. This is driven by the fight/flight response, and prompts us to try to change the situation. But if that reaction is blocked or not responded to, the sympathetic arousal cannot be soothed or discharged. 

Without the nervous system being able to regulate back down again, we remain in states of high arousal, irritability and anxiety, but if this persists, the nervous system gets overloaded. We instinctively adapt by shutting down, shifting into the parasympathetic system’s freeze response. The undischarged emotion, however, stays bound up in the system, in the form of physical tension, alert and defensive states, or collapsed and frozen states. The high nervous system arousal and systemic dysregulation of trauma make it difficult to hold a state of open awareness such as in mindfulness meditation, and it keep us from being present in our bodies.

Steps towards Somatic Awareness

Mindful Somatic Exercises include: Grounding, Centering, Breathing and so much more. Try doing them once a day for a period of two months. Whichever exercises you do, give yourself some time afterwards before interacting with other people. Take a couple of minutes to be with your experience. Put some words to it for yourself: are there any different feelings that you notice about yourself now? Then open your eyes and look around the room for a minute, just noticing how it is to be there now, and if anything looks any different. It’s important to have this time after the exercises for you to integrate your altered body-affect state before going back to relating to people.

Begin by standing up, and taking a moment to notice how you feel, how your breathing is, and where your attention and energy are. Notice anything that’s there, and if you can’t notice anything, that’s fine too.

CHECK-IN JOURNAL PROMPTS:

What is opening up for you after reading this?

How has your awareness shifted?

Have your reactions shifted?

Do you feel more in control or less in control of your thoughts, decisions, mood, and why?