Why Somatic Therapy?

We all go through periods of time when we feel that lives are boring, dark, sad, and hopeless, or we are stuck in the anxieties about survival in our daily life and angry that we cannot meet our own expectations or those of others. What is behind those feelings and why they are so powerful? Why do we feel stuck in them and most of the time cannot find a way out, no matter what, or how hard we try? 

We all have certain programs which were installed in us in a beginning of our lives when we began to interact within our family and to the outside world. These programs are the building blocks of our psyche ,constantly running in our unconscious mind and are outside of our conscious awareness.  We call them emotional learnings and they are our responses to the environment we grew up in. We are forced to adapt to the rules of our immediate family and the world at large. Our feedback system of punishment and reward also plays a great role in how we organize ourselves in the world, especially when we have some traumatic events that happened in our lives. Trauma is such an overwhelming event for our psyche that it gets stored in a memory system as frozen, timeless movie frame that keep us stuck in playback mode loops. We are finding that the same situations play repeatedly in our lives and we find ourselves chasing some resolutions that always seems intangible.  These unconscious mechanisms manifest in a variety of symptoms and painful emotional responses to internal and external triggers throughout our day to day lives. The path to their resolution lies in accessing the feelings, images, and sensations that were felt at the time of the original trauma and exploring, expressing and repairing them inside the security of a therapeutic setting.  

 Another reason why we use the body as the gateway to gain access to the psyche lies in how we internalize emotions. Our psyche creates a very intricate defense mechanisms which are on lookout if emotionally overwhelming events are happening again. In order to protect us from that "attack", our body lives in an armor of tension not only in our muscle system but also internally in our ligaments and connective tissue (fascia) that hold our organ systems in place. Over time this can lead to various health problems.  After releasing that armor of tension, most of the people become aware of how "exhausted" and "tired" they feel and how much it costs their body to hold themselves "together." Living with the unconscious expectation of danger consumes a huge amount of energy, creating the feelings of "lifelessness" and "numbness" that so many people report.     

Recent neuroscientific research shows that not only the thinking (neocortex) part of the brain is involved in our emotional responses but also many other regions of the brain, namely the mid-line part of the brain and the right hemisphere are responsible for emotional networking. This means that just verbal therapy frequently does not reach deep, core emotional memories because they are stored in the non-verbal, non-rational parts of the brain. We need to access the feelings and sensations in the body behind our thoughts to connect to the underlying layer of raw emotions stored in the psyche. The body is our emotional container and when we experience trauma we disconnect from the body, compartmentalizing and separating the mind from the body, emotions from images and sensations.       

The main purpose of us working together would be to release layer after layer the malignant adaptations and trauma responses out of your system and to create more and more expansion into your own Self.  We explore and change your core beliefs and judgements about yourself and work on the expansion into your own Being, outside of the outdated programs that keep you prisoner in your own life. This allows for a feeling of spaciousness in oneself and a sense of aliveness, where we become curious about life our ourselves.  The goal is to start living our lives rather than acting as players in our own unconscious dramas.