Somatic Therapy
Somatic Therapy — a Holistic, Body-Centered Approach to Counseling
Are you searching for a therapy that facilitates healing through accessing the innate wisdom of the mind, body, and spirit?
Somatic—or body-centered—psychotherapy offers a holistic lens that promotes health and healing. By tapping into the body’s innate intelligence, somatic therapy allows you to shift your body-mind state from one of distress to one of more ease, flow, and greater regulation.
At the Somatic Nature Therapy Institute, we believe in the body-mind’s incredible wisdom to lead the way in counseling. To see if somatic therapy is the right approach for you, contact us.
A Brief History of Somatic Therapy and How it’s Used
While Dr. Wilhelm Reich is typically cited as the founder of somatic psychotherapy within the western model of counseling, cultures throughout time have deeply known and drawn upon the wisdom of our body-minds to offer clues, as well as pathways, toward healing.
Along with his students John Pierrakos and Alexander Lowen, Reich began incorporating elements of movement and breathwork into his therapeutic research and practice during the early twentieth century. Through these practices, his clients were able to access a sense of aliveness while alleviating mental, emotional, and physiological distress and pain.
Over time and through a wide variety of cultural and academic influences, the field of somatic therapy has grown and blossomed with a plethora of well known, well researched, and respected body-centered modalities available today. These include Somatic Experiencing™, Dance Movement Therapy, Psychodrama, Body-Mind Psychotherapy, Hakomi, EMDR therapy, Gestalt therapy, and Wilderness Therapy, among others. Concepts of somatic therapy have been recently popularized in Bessel Van der Kolk’s works—notably The Body Keeps The Score, in which he explores the correlation between traumatic experiences and anxiety, depression, and overall emotional dysregulation.
The Somatic Nature Therapy Institute offers a broad, personalized approach to somatic healing. We are influenced by the above-mentioned modalities, and depending on client experiences and goals, can incorporate Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), parts work, ceremony and ritual, along with wilderness and nature-based therapy.
Whether you struggle with trauma-related symptoms, grief, life transitions, anxiety, depression, relationship challenges, body image issues, mental health issues, or chronic pain, somatic therapy is one of the most effective ways to evoke your own innate wisdom, regulate your nervous system and promote a more easeful, compassionate, and integrated quality of life.
How Does Somatic Therapy Work?
Our bodies and minds are inextricably connected. However, while our minds can debate and distort stories, our bodies help us navigate back to our inherent impulses, emotions, and sensations—all of which provide us with information about what is most important in our lives. This can lead us onto a clearer pathway of healing. A somatic approach to counseling includes, and goes beyond, the cognitive to explore the interconnection of emotions and sensations, along with beliefs and stories.
Somatic therapy can shift your stress response at the brain-body level by helping you learn to tolerate feeling pleasure as well as pain.
The Somatic Therapy Process
Therapy begins with a brief consultation to determine if a somatic approach can benefit you. From there, we will complete a standard intake, including inquiring about key elements of your life, history, and goals for counseling. We will work together to establish an integrative somatic therapy plan that is tailored for you.
Throughout this process, you will identify your internal, external, and/or spiritual resources, and work to grow your connection to these nourishing or grounding aspects of life. As you connect more fully with these positive or neutral aspects of your life experience, you’ll naturally grow your window of tolerance to be able to look at and feel more uncomfortable memories, emotions, and sensations. This allows a sense of enough internal safety to process old fears and hurt.
In somatic therapy, we look to the body-mind for answers, exploring questions like: What is happening? What is wanting to happen? and What is the wisdom at the foundation of each impulse? The insights we develop through asking these questions point us in the direction of health and illuminate satisfying pathways of expression and new perspectives.
Somatic Therapy is the Foundation of Our Counseling Approach
At the Somatic Nature Therapy Institute, everything we do is through a somatic lens. Through an integrative and experiential approach, we find that our clients are able to move through obstacles on a full-body, organismic level, allowing them to regain emotional and physical movement, flow, ease, hope, and a sense of possibility.
Our practice founder, Katie Asmus, has master’s level training in somatic therapy, with an emphasis in Dance/Movement Therapy from Naropa University. She also brings 25 years of training and practice in additional somatic modalities. For more than two decades, she has worked with clients at agencies and in private practice, trained graduate students and fellow therapists in somatic methods, and presented workshops and keynote lectures internationally. In addition to weaving somatic methods into counseling for individuals, the Somatic Nature Therapy Institute offers:
● Multi-hour and multi-day intensives, both indoors and out in nature
● A nine-month online Somatic Soul-Based Trauma Training program for psychotherapists, coaches, and healers
● A five-day in-person training program centered on nature-based interventions for working with trauma, attachment, and nervous system regulation
Through these offerings, a roadmap is available to clients, therapists, and healers alike to enhance somatic skills-building and work toward greater nervous system regulation.
Trust Your Body’s Wisdom
If you’re struggling with the effects of grief, anxiety, trauma, or a significant life transition, your nervous system has most likely been impacted and needs some support to begin to shift its current habituated state, move some of the held energy, and find more flow as well as a baseline of health and wellness.
The answer to your healing lies within. Using integrative somatic methods through our therapy practice, you will achieve a new sense of understanding, capacity, efficacy, and empowerment that will allow you to not just survive but thrive. For more information, contact us for a free 20-minute consultation.