Talking therapy is incredibly helpful for understanding ourselves and making sense of our experiences. But sometimes we can leave the therapy room feeling better – having new insights and clarity – only to step straight into the same patterns; feeling bad about ourself, feeling stressed or exhausted, feeling anxious or worried or stuck in reactive and repetitive behaviours.
This can be because so many therapeutic interventions completely overlook the body.
In Somatic Therapy, Thomas Hanna explores the concept of the ‘soma’. Not a mind and a body, but a whole person, perceived from within; a living being with an internal experience, where the mind and body are continuously connected through the nervous system.
Sitting within our nervous system is our neuromuscular system, which enables voluntary and involuntary movements by relaying electrical signals from the central nervous system to muscle fibres.
Our nervous system continuously scans our environment for cues of safety or danger, beneath our conscious awareness. It scans and decides; do I need protection or am I safe?
When something registers as ‘off’, the amygdala (the ‘smoke detector’ of the brain) fires and sends our whole system into protection mode. This overrides our conscious brain and narrows our access to logical thought, choice and decision making.
This is our sympathetic nervous system getting activated, and when this happens, we have mobilised, anxious, urgent energy, our breathing can become shallow, and, crucially, our muscles become tense, ready for action; fight or flight.
Our nervous system is designed for this; it has kept us safe in the moment.
However, over time, through adverse experiences, repetitive stress and trauma, we can get stuck in this sympathetic response, our nervous system loses flexibility to return to a parasympathetic (relaxed) state and our muscles can become chronically tight, contracted and stuck in survival mode. This is often outside of our conscious awareness.
These patterns, or survival responses, show up as holding patterns in our body; a hunched back and a tight neck as if we are protecting ourselves and looking for threats, a tight back as if we are preparing to defend ourselves or fight, a twisted torso as if we are ready to flee.
Our stress is reflected in these embodied patterns.
The brain receives messages from the body. But if the body is trapped in protective holding patterns, the brain signals back to the nervous system that there is a threat. And we get stuck in a doom loop of stress and muscle contraction.
If our body is in constant survival mode, our mind (being part of our soma; our whole being) receives messages that “we are not safe”.
These messages shape our thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves. They form core beliefs. We can begin to see ourself as anxious or negative or reactive. We start to tell ourselves “I cannot cope” or “I am broken”. They sit beneath the noise of everyday thought and they shape what you expect, what you notice and how you respond to the world.
From a polyvagal perspective (based on the work of Stephen Porges), core beliefs do not form when we feel safe, protected and connected (the ventral state); they form when we are in survival mode.
Some common stories;
In sympathetic: I am not safe, I have to be perfect
In dorsal (shutdown): I do not matter, there is no point
In freeze or fawn: my needs do not matter, I am only of value when I’m helping others
The story seems true, but it is coming from our physiology, not our personality.
This all occurs outside of our conscious awareness and over time we can forget how to live – and move – with ease. Thomas Hanna referred to this as Sensory Motor Amnesia; when the brain forgets how to relax certain muscle groups and therefore we get stuck in embodied stress patterns.
Somatic experiencing involves identifying the holding patterns that we have developed over time and forming new neural pathways. Through sensing and focusing, exploring the “felt sense” on the edge of our awareness, we can begin to become more aware of where we hold tightness and tension.
Pandiculation; the experience of sensing and moving gradually into these patterns of tightness in order to consciously release out of them, enables us to re-introduce voluntary movement and therefore control over our neuromuscular system.
Over time, with patience and small manageable steps (titration), our soma can integrate new possibilities.
The sense of being “stuck” in a particular nervous system state will shift; we can move between them more fluidly.
…And with a new state becomes a new story.