Embodied Processing / Somatic Therapy

Many of us have lost touch with the felt sense of who we are, living mostly in our minds. As Michael Singer says, “The mind is a place the soul goes to escape from the heart.” When life brings big emotions and stress, our nervous system can become overwhelmed, and disconnecting from the body often becomes a way to cope.

More recently we have started to understand the need of "feeling it to heal it” and that the body keeps the score - as per the title of the best selling book by Bessel Van Der Kolk.

What does it mean to be Trauma Informed?

To be trauma-informed means to understand that we’re working with our nervous system's survival instinct, and the way these drive us in our lives. We do not choose to react a specific way - our nervous system reacts automatically to different situations and is not a cognitive experience. We therefore work with that system ie the nervous system within the body and NOT with the cognitive mind.

Embodied Processing (EP) / Somatic Therapy –

Getting to the Root of Your Symptoms Through a Nervous System Lens

EP is based on the latest neuroscience, and is a trauma-informed, body-based (ie somatic) approach that helps with chronic pain, stress, and other symptoms of trauma. It works via the intelligence of the subconscious mind (within the body), building your ability to regulate your nervous system.

What is Trauma?

Trauma is what happens in the body when we don’t have the capacity to safely process and recover from a threat. When something is overwhelming, frightening, or deeply distressing and the nervous system doesn’t have the capacity or support to fully process it, the experience can get “stuck” in the body. Instead of moving through a natural stress cycle (like fight, flight, or freeze and then recovery), the nervous system may stay in a state of dysregulation. This can look like:

• Hyperarousal (anxiety, panic, hypervigilance, irritability)

• Hypoarousal (numbness, depression, disconnection, exhaustion)

• A mix of both

In this state, the body continues reacting as if the threat is still present, even long after it’s over. That’s why trauma can show up as physical symptoms, emotional overwhelm, or behavioural patterns that don’t seem to make sense logically.

Depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD, chronic pain and so on are manifestations of trauma and a dysregulated nervous system. Talk therapy cannot help resolve these issues as we need to work with the system that created them in the beginning.

Trauma does not have to be something big like sexual, mental or physical abuse. Trauma is not getting your needs met, not being loved unconditionally by a parent, being bullied at school, the death of a pet and so on. Therefore, we all have some amount of trauma.

What Are the Benefits of EP?

EP allows us to use the intelligence of the body (ie the subconscious mind) to tap into unprocessed emotions from the past, fully process and integrate them. By doing so, we become more regulated.

Work starts by developing your sense of safety in the body, so you can feel safe, grounded, and present. Once this is established, we start to explore discomfort in the body, increase your capacity to hold space for difficult emotions, so that the stored trauma can be processed.