You Do Not Need to be an Expert on the Language
Such a beautiful attribute about somatic therapy is the attunement to the exact right words or sounds that fit your in-the-moment lived experience as it unfolds. This means that the words we use one session or even one minute might be different than what fits for you in the next.
For those who are interested, this post offers a sort of glossary of complex concepts underlying what might seem simple in a somatic session.
Somatic Psychotherapy is sensing into the body in the here and now, offering healing through attuned awareness of sensation, embodied emotion, and physical movement. Somatically oriented therapy moves more slowly. Bessel van Der Kolk teaches “Don’t press the gas in trauma therapy until you can push the brakes.”
Pushing the gas (processing traumatic pain) would be jumping straight into your trauma story, almost as if you were reliving it since the present doesn’t feel different enough.
Pushing the brakes (regulation) looks different for different nervous system orientations. Some people start therapy from a more depressed, low energy, no motivation, freeze-like state. For them, the brakes actually sounds contrary where we are looking for some activation, something that feels different in the body and signals possibility for change. And, for others prone to higher activation, fight-flight states, we might be starting with grounding, soothing, relaxing the nervous system.
Either way, the body needs to know that different is possible to begin offering new experiences as evidence against the negativity bias shaped by our traumatic past. Without resourcing, without brakes, it’s not trauma therapy.
Once we know different ways your systems respond, different ways of pressing the brakes, then we push the gas in the pacing and direction that best supports your growth.
This metaphor naturally introduces, I think, the two terms that differentiate talk therapy and trauma therapy the most:
- Titrating means that we are going to take the right bite-sized bits of information, not overwhelming your system. I might say something like, Is it okay for us to be with 1% of this black hole feeling in your stomach right now?
- Pendulation is the oscillation between pain and resource. Again, the focus of trauma therapy is offering the physiological memory of trauma in your body, and the traumatic narrative in your mind, the possibility that things are different now, that if something happened at all similar to what happened back then that should not have, that you would be able to handle it with the support and resources you need to get away or move through it adaptively. We do this by bringing resources we practice together–imagery, posture, movement, and role-playing relational boundaries–into the processing of activated painful material as it comes up in our therapy sessions.
When we tune into your body, we may be tracking the moment-to-moment experience through:
- Interoceptive Awareness: your visceral sense or the conscious awareness where the nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates signals originating from within the body (Craig, 2009).
- What we are tracking: Breath, heart rate, temperature, pressure, tightness or release, visceral sensations in your gut, chest, or throat
- Why interoception matters? This is how we learn to feel safety returning, rather than attempting to think our way into it.
- Potential in-session activities: Polyvagal Ladder Mapping, Vagal Toning, EMDR resourcing
- Kinesthetic Awareness: your awareness of your body’s movement in space
- What we are tracking: impulses to move, push, pull, run, curl, reach, tremors, shaking, stretching, micro-movements, completion of interrupted action patterns
- Why kinesthetic sensation matters? This is where fight-flight survival responses finally get to complete–without overwhelming the system.
- Potential in-session activities: EMDR processing, somatic movement
- Proprioseptive Awareness: your awareness of your joints, your posture, your balance, and your body’s position in space.
- What we are tracking: orientation to your limbs, sense of grounding, uprightness versus collapsed posture, weight distribution, center of gravity
- Why proprioception matters? Proprioception restores a sense of physical agency and coherence, often disrupted by trauma. The result sounds like: “I am here, I have a body, I take up space.”
- Potential in-session activities: Using the therapeutic relationship for safety resourcing, boundary work
- Exteroceptive Awareness: your awareness of the external environment through your senses
- What we are tracking: visual orientation, sounds, light, spatial awareness, perception of safety in the room/space
- Why proprioception matters? Exteroception anchors the nervous system in the present moment, counteracting trauma’s pull into the past. The result sounds like: “I am here, now, and I am safe enough.”
- Potential in-session activities: Using the therapeutic relationship for safety resourcing, boundary work, DARe Support Team exercises, using visual focus, eye gaze, eye stretches
- Affect Sensation Awareness: your awareness of emotion tracked through the body, not through analytic narratives.
- What we are tracking: emotional energy as heat, pressure, texture, expansion, contraction, shifts in intensity, emotional waves without story attachment
- Why tracking affect sensation matters? Feelings are experienced as information, not something to manage or suppress. This allows for emotion to move without cognitive looping or retraumatization.
- Potential in-session activities: using imagery, textures, and color to describe the sense of emotion. I may assign emotion coloring or emotion-as-color journaling as homework.
- Meaning Making: After we have sat with all that arises naturally from within you and around you, then cognitive insight offers new interpretations of the situation after somatic completion of the body systems.
- What we are tracking: new realizations, perspective shifts, spontaneous reorganization of belief, increased sense of choice
- Why meaning-making after somatic relief matters? Meaning follows regulation. Wisdom emerges once the body believes the danger has passed.
- Potential in-session activities: Highlighting the difference between inner wisdom and intuition. Then using EMDR-Future Templates to see yourself bringing this inner wisdom into future situations and environments.
Right pace, right depth, right kind of support—so the body can recover and the Self can reorganize.
I appreciate Scott Lyon’s sort of golden rules for somatic sessions. We are:
- Tracking capacity, not pushing content
- Following impulse, not narrative
- Supporting completion, not catharsis
- Prioritizing regulation before insight
In my personal self-regulation and growth practices, I enjoy qigong retreats at the start of each season. Qigong has an understanding that energy flows in these four complementary ways:
1. Expand ↔ Contract regulates boundaries and capacity
- Expand: Qi moves outward—opening, expressing, radiating, reaching.
- Contract: Qi returns inward—closing, containing, consolidating, protecting.
2. Rise (Up) ↔ Sink (Down) supports nervous system regulation and balance
- Rise: Qi lifts—clarity, alertness, inspiration, lightness.
- Sink: Qi settles—grounding, digestion, rest, embodiment.
3. Gather ↔ Disperse (or Release) governs vitality and flow versus stagnation
- Gather: Qi collects and concentrates—building reserves, focus, cohesion.
- Disperse / Release: Qi spreads or lets go—circulation, expression, clearing excess.
4. Receive ↔ Give echoes relational concepts of reciprocity, related to attachment and relational patterns
- Receive: Qi is taken in—listening, nourishment, being supported.
- Give: Qi is offered out—expression, effort, contribution, care.
In qigong the goal is to move fluidly between both sides of each pair, restoring choice, responsiveness, and internal safety. And, the same can be true for trauma healing. We know that one of the ways we see resilience the most is through the flexibility to adapt to situations, events, and changing circumstances.
- Expansion without contraction may feel like burnout or blurred boundaries.
- Rising without sinking may feel like anxiety or dissociation.
- Gathering without dispersing may feel like holding, tension, or stuckness.
- Giving without receiving may feel like depletion or people-pleasing.
Utilizing Window of Tolerance and Polyvagal Theory Ladder
Likely, we will map your fight-flight-freeze-collapse tendencies and the regulation strategies that prove the most helpful to use, utilizing these two graphics.
Polyvagal Theory shows us that someone moves through fight-flight activation before landing in a freeze-collapse stance, believing there is no way out of harm’s way. We will identify what hypoarousal and hyperarousal look like for you, identifying what tends to send you there, and which upregulating and downregulating strategies work best for you to move back into your Window of Tolerance. In this space, you are able to connect with yourself and others.
We will know we’re meeting your goals for therapy when you spend more time in your Window, and when you are pushed out, that you are able to move back into your Window through compassionate attunement and permission to move and gather in the ways your systems require, in the moment, allowing the next moment to exhale, expand, and begin anew.
