Somatic therapy is increasingly recognized for its efficacy in addressing trauma stored in the body. This approach not only promotes mental well-being but also nurtures overall health by incorporating therapeutic touch, which fosters a deeper connection and helps release emotional tension.
An example of somatic healing involves a client who experienced a physical response during bodywork, where a long-forgotten foot injury resurfaced along with emotional memories and childhood fears. Through gentle unwinding and emotional exploration, the client released the distress associated with the past injury, ultimately finding a sense of safety in the present.
Emotional experiences are intricately stored in the body and can significantly impact physical health. Prominent figures in somatic therapy note that the body's natural responses carry intuitive significance in the healing process. Recognizing the body as an invaluable resource for healing and acknowledging intuitive messages can promote a transformative pathway towards genuine healing.
Somatic therapy showcases the body's innate wisdom in responding to emotional experiences. It demonstrates the essential role of physical touch and emotional release in therapeutic healing practices, amplifying the transformative power of somatic therapy to support individuals on their journey to emotional and physical well-being.
Chapters: The Power of Somatic Therapy: Healing Through the Body
Somatic therapy is increasingly recognized for its efficacy in addressing trauma stored in the body. This approach not only promotes mental well-being but also nurtures overall health by incorporating therapeutic touch, which fosters a deeper connection and helps release emotional tension.
An example of somatic healing involves a client who experienced a physical response during bodywork, where a long-forgotten foot injury resurfaced along with emotional memories and childhood fears. Through gentle unwinding and emotional exploration, the client released the distress associated with the past injury, ultimately finding a sense of safety in the present.
Emotional experiences are intricately stored in the body and can significantly impact physical health. Prominent figures in somatic therapy note that the body's natural responses carry intuitive significance in the healing process. Recognizing the body as an invaluable resource for healing and acknowledging intuitive messages can promote a transformative pathway towards genuine healing.
Somatic therapy showcases the body's innate wisdom in responding to emotional experiences. It demonstrates the essential role of physical touch and emotional release in therapeutic healing practices, amplifying the transformative power of somatic therapy to support individuals on their journey to emotional and physical well-being.
Chapters: The Power of Somatic Therapy: Healing Through the Body
Today's topic is somatic therapy, and I couldn't be more thrilled to talk about something that is huge and up and coming in, yeah, the world. Not just mental health therapy, but, if you're starting to see it come, across all different fields. He's a trauma specialist that created a unique and powerful approach to help people heal from traumatic experiences that get trapped in their body.
Speaker 2:
Welcome to, Unscripted, your guide to discovering the various options available to you in the integrated and collaborative medicine space. I'm Janine Barandi and I've been treating patients with acupuncture for 10 years.
Speaker 1:
And I'm Jenny Poole. I'm a trauma specialist and somatic therapist with a passion for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The objective of our podcast is to explore the various care options available. Through our years of practice, we've found that different modalities can complement each other and conventional medicine.
Speaker 2:
We hope our conversations resonate and help you find the right tools and specialists for your unique needs.
Speaker 1:
We believe in an advanced care model where the doctor is not the only expert. We encourage you to embrace a mindset where your practitioners are your teammates who ultimately empower you to take control of your health.
Speaker 2:
As with every episode, this is not intended to act as medical advice and no patient practitioner relationship is formed from subscribing or tuning in. Hey, this is such an up and coming topic.
Speaker 1:
A lot of people have questions about it and within my practice I know I refer to you a lot. I mean, I pretty much refer to you exclusively and I'm like, yeah, you got to go see Jenny Poole because she does somatic therapy. She's a body worker. She went and got her massage license so that she could do somatic work, so that she had permission to touch people. And when they hear that they're like oh well, what is that? I've heard of the MDR. But I'm like Jenny does brain spotting and Jenny does body work. She does somatic work, she's the best. I send you a ton of people you do and you take really good care of my people, so thank you.
Speaker 1:
Let's talk about what somatic therapy is, though, because there's a huge wave of it coming into the world. You're starting to hear a lot about somatic therapy and people asking for somatics. Do you do somatic therapy? And there are so many modalities that even you can do with somatic therapy that don't require a hands-on approach. You talked about EMDR. Brain spotting don't require a hands-on approach. You talked about EMDR brain spotting. Those you don't have to have any kind of a hands-on approach, because that can be a tricky place for a lot of therapists to traverse.
Speaker 1:
I definitely wanted to get my license and be able to do structural body work, because I knew that one day that these disciplines would have more cohesiveness, which is beautiful because it helps move the needle on healing, yeah, and when I was in my training as an acupuncturist, somatic work was just starting to bubble up, and I, right after I graduated in 2014, I worked pretty hard to get myself into a VA medical center, and I was especially excited to work with a woman by the name of Elaine Duncan, who has done a lot of studying under Bessie.
Speaker 1:
VanderKaal and Peter Levine, and she's just an earth shaker and a mover and I learned a lot about somatic work from her and I saw her applying these principles with our veterans and her work was powerful. It just involved a touch. This is sometimes all it takes to bring somebody down, sometimes all it takes to bring somebody down. But by and large in medicine nowadays we don't have permission to touch from a psychological perspective, like if you're going to go get your LCSW or your psychotherapy license, you don't have permission to touch your patients, right. But look at how, look at the energy at which you came.
Speaker 1:
That was such a good example of what it means to just have therapeutic touch involved in any kind of therapeutic experience. Even when you're showing care and concern, just the hey, I'm here, yeah, and this isn't invasive and also obviously consent, like, hey, can I can I help, support you? Hey, can I reach out, can I touch your arm here? It's so important and and someone's saying yes, please, and and you're, you're not wrong is that somatic therapies don't have to be complicated. They don't have to be complex and what they that the heart of what some of them do is is help people get back to feeling connected, right.
Speaker 1:
Connected to themselves, yeah, connected to care outside of themselves, versus the dangers of, versus a fried nervous system and afraid fight or flight. It's just constantly in a better flight or freaks. Yeah, I'm so glad that we started out with this subject because I, as an acupuncturist, I get to touch people all day long and it's beautiful. One of the things that I do is I will assess the pulses and it never fails as soon as somebody lays down on the table and I walk over it, man and I grab their hands and I'm like hey, just relax. And they'll hold their hands up like this and they're like I am relaxing, you're not just relax, relax, okay, and then, and then we start to listen.
Speaker 1:
We start to listen to one another in a way that is really quite special and it brings the person down. And in my experience in working with our future medical providers, this, this kind of thing, is not taught. We don't get this when we go to see the doctor, and so you get a cuff and a machine right, and we don't get this when we go to see our therapist. But what you do, you get that sense of touch and that sense of acceptance and and welcoming and like, oh my gosh, somebody's touching me. I mean, think about when you were a baby. You got touched. Most of us got touched and held as a baby, and so that thing is very primal to be fair to.
Speaker 1:
If you didn't get touched, especially with your baby, then there's problems oh yeah, problem. So to your point touch was necessary. Yeah, to help create safety connection regulation yeah yeah, and even just just the way that the therapeutic touch and the therapeutic exchange that just happened there, as you hold my hand and you start taking my pulse, there's a gentleness to it and there's this feeling that goes I'm going to get some help, right. And that's all happening without a verbal exchange. Other, than.
Speaker 1:
I'm checking your pulses. So it goes without saying that most of our communication is nonverbal, but sometimes we so heavily rely on what we're saying verbally. Yeah, that's the beautiful thing about somatic therapy and that's one of the things that I teach the therapist I work with is, when you learn how to do somatic therapy or you're using somatics, you start to learn to myth. So I can watch somebody's pulse change when they change from being in a space of being calm or distressed. So if they start talking about something that distresses them, not only will their eyes move sometimes those are telling their story to different places but tension in their face, tension in their neck, tension in their hand you can just see if you know how to look for it tension in the body, and that's telling you that I have something that I can then release in the body yeah.
Speaker 1:
And not just through talking. Now let's talk about how important it is to talk about things. Well, of course it is. Talk therapy has its place and being able to talk about what happened to you, especially if you didn't have a voice. Now you get to have a voice. There's an unencumbering that happens and a freedom of saying. I felt like I didn't have a voice.
Speaker 1:
I felt too scared to say anything, and now I have a voice, I felt too scared to say anything and now I have a voice, right. Yeah, forget to get it out. So I'm not saying that it doesn't have a place, but where I think that somatics is really going to continue to take off, is that creating that voice, telling the story, seeing, seeing her, and invalidated, like we need to as human beings. Now we also remove any kind of somatic imprint that started to essentially get recorded on our body. These bodies, these bodies that we have, are big, huge recording devices. They will record literally every experience you've ever had.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that's why people sometimes well oftentimes, when they have surgery, you'll wake up and they'll be in tears and they are in tons of pain meds.
Speaker 1:
They're not hurting, yeah, but while their conscious body didn't know that they were getting cut into in some way or the other, their body did. Oftentimes they're waking up and they're having a response because they need more pain meds or they're in pain, but because their body knows something happened to us, even if it was a good thing, like my knee needed to be repaired but it got cut into, and my body knows that it got cut into even though my mind went to sleep. Yeah, and if you think about. If we observe an animal in the wild and the animal successfully escapes its predator, that animal will do something to shake it off. It will bound or it'll wail or it'll, it'll shake, it'll scream, it'll do something to shake off the threat of annihilation. And like, our bodies are similar too. But but we live in a culture that's kind of said to us like hey, you got to keep it together. Yeah, if you're in distress, I need to calm you down as fast as possible. So you stop having distress versus shake that off hold them down, move your ambulance like move your body as much as you need to, don't stop that that's
Speaker 1:
good for you. You're not hearing those messages. It's like how can I calm you down as fast as I can? Yeah, because you're distressed. Now I'm gonna start distressing me and I don't like it. Versus he shoot that off. Like, get that out of your body. If your body needs to unwind, let it do whatever it wants to, yeah, so let me give you an example of that.
Speaker 1:
I it was in my brain spotting training, which we'll talk about what brain spotting is?
Speaker 1:
It's, I would say, somewhat an emdr's cousin and I was working with a gal we were practicing and she had been in a pretty bad horseback riding accident, so bad that she ran into a fence and the horse and her got tangled up.
Speaker 1:
And as she's unwinding now again, this is all hands off and as we found her where in the eye field the brain spot was held and where all that trauma memory was stored, and as we found her where in the eye field the brain spot was held and where all that trauma memory was stored, and as we're unencapsulating it and she's kind of you can, when your brain's fine, you can hold your spot and you can also go and you're kind of like unwinding, letting the body unwind while you're doing some breathing.
Speaker 1:
At one point she started doing this and she's like and then she opened up her eyes almost and like what is my body doing? And we don't stop it. It wants to unwind. But it was unwinding and it looked like she was riding a horse. How interesting, because the somatic imprint of that day was she was on a horse and so I said just let your shoulder kind of at once at first, because when we're unwinding the body is trying to untangle. That movement feels weird and sometimes we then try and manage not just our perceptions about everyone else's perceptions. Yeah, and that's sometimes where the interruption happens.
Speaker 2:
It's like well, I'm acting weird. Yeah, to like push it down again, like everybody's told me my whole life push down.
Speaker 1:
yeah, don't be weird. The body's an intuitive vessel and if you give it the doorway to unwind, then it just will, organically will, because now we're not in the way of it. And so she eventually just let it unwind and she had taken the blow all the way to this side of the body and then it was significant the repair that needed to happen to her physical body after all the injuries.
Speaker 1:
So, again, that somatic imprint is recorded. And if you and if you only talk about something but you don't let the body discharge all of that survival energy that built up. And this is where we talk about fascia. Right, the fascia is the matrix of the body, that that structurally holds us together. It holds our organs together, our muscles together. It's what's wrapped around our whole body. Yeah, and I truly believe that so much emotional debris can get stored in the fascia and as you start unwinding someone's fascia and you can do that even just with those gentle touches is that you can release so much emotional debris and sometimes it's the simplest touch that can then it's like a ripple in the pond. If you touch the pond pond, it doesn't just have one ripple and stop it, it ripples out. That's what the body will do. If the body has room to unwind, it will how about I just do it?
Speaker 1:
I'm going to say something else about the fascia and and how it relates to eastern medicine and this concept of the acupuncture points and where the points are located. We've, you know, we've been able to successfully show, doing examination of the fascia, that the acupuncture points exist on the fascia where there are collections of nerve and vessels. That's cool, and so you start to think about how interconnected your body is If the fascia is wrapping every muscle, every bone, everything in your body, then hell yeah, you're an interconnected network and it's why I can put a needle right here and have it affect the other side of the body all the way down close to your feet.
Speaker 1:
so your, your body is one very interconnected highway. So, yes, yeah, well, the information that's constantly communicating with itself and when I'm explaining somatic therapy to people because it's a very new concept for some people, some people like I've never even heard of this is I help them understand that. Do you believe that your cardiovascular system, your heart, works in sync with your lungs, like? So your heart pumping is a part of you rest, you know, having respiratory, like breathing, but then also your digest, like, if you can, if you can accept that the physical body works in sync with each other and that one couldn't really work without the other? We can't just be like hey, heart, I just kind of want you to be right now and hey, long it was. Just, you know, you can take a break and just do these other systems. They all just work in in unison, and you'll learn that in any anatomy and physiology course that you take in any medical education program. Yeah for sure. So then, so then you so, so then plug in the belief that then why isn't the emotional body, the mental body and the physical body then also working and seeing each other. And when you're having physical and emotional like when you have emotional debris, it's going to affect the physical body. If you're having an emotional distressing experience, it's going to affect the fascia. But what creates tightness in the body? Because the emotions affect the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system will drive your biochemistry. The biochemistry drives how you exist inside of your body and the chemical soup it's your medicine, it's your brain's own medicine that's getting fired and it will fire quickly and things will change really fast in the presence of an emotional upset. Yes, yes, and here's two examples, and one's a little bit more benign and the other one's more significant.
Speaker 1:
So I was working with a little one, 11 year old, and they were having so much stomach pain, so much distress in the gastric area, and couldn't have gone to more medical appointments trying to figure this out. No ulcers, no perforated, anything, right. There was nothing medically like that was right, right. And so at one point doctor said it's just all in your head and that, and as a kid, we do the best we can with the information we have and we don't have really great coping skills as a kid. We do the best we can with the information we have, and we don't have really great coping skills as a kid, and so I think that that moment was well then. I'm just weird because I'm really not feeling good, but this person is telling me that it's just in my head, and so what I had to explain to this little one was well, sure, it's in your head.
Speaker 1:
That's where sometimes, oftentimes, our emotions, in our heart too, are generated. We're feeling something, we're thinking something. But, I said, one of the things I want you to understand so that you feel more validated, is that you will have a physiological response to emotions. Undeniably, you watch somebody get mad. They're not just sitting there all like neutral in their body. If they're mad, guess what starts to happen? The child gets tight. The what starts to happen?
Speaker 1:
the jaw gets tight, the body starts to get tight people sometimes ball their hands up in a fist so as that anger is growing. This is just an example that you're starting to have a physiological response to the emotion that you're feeling anxiety. So anxiety is hidden and in this particular little one as anxiety, my experience hits up. In here in the chest or right here we process and digest, ironically, food. I really believe you process and digest emotions, experiences, and over time there had been so much anxiety that, literally and I showed the little one that says let me show you in your stomach how just tight your fascia is. I just knew. And sure enough, they were like, it was like concrete. And as we unwound the fascia in the stomach so cool guess what came after that?
Speaker 1:
emotional tears, tears and just all of the worries, all of the fears, and and no more encumberment, no more being bound. And can you imagine all of that? That physiological response to anxiety had created so much tightness that, of course, the stomach was squished. There was a lot of acid reflux. Of course, the liver and the organs and everything in the bowels were really squished, because that's how much tension over time this little one had accumulated in their body and it was literally like oh.
Speaker 2:
And then it's like and go to school and be good.
Speaker 1:
And the doctor said it was on your head and so, come on, you're fine. And and those are conflicting messages, because the little one again with very limited skill set, yeah, this is going, I'm sure I don't feel like it's in my head. This feels really real in my body. So somatic therapy is so powerful because it gets from a bottom-up approach.
Speaker 1:
So the talking, what's happening in the mind's important, but we get to to where the release can happen and then the rest can flow and that's that cohesive progression that you want to see so you can really eventually slough off the emotional debris and and then reclaim safety and reclaim equilibrium, yeah, in the body, which is ultimately what the body wants. Totally, I want to reframe this concept of like it's all in your head, and I do think I I know quite a few people that work in allopathic medicine, conventional medicine, osteopathic. We talk about our doctor, our primary care physician, and we're totally not here to hate on primary care physicians my gosh, if you're in an accident, please go to shock trauma. Your acupuncturist is not where you need to go. But this concept of it's all in your head.
Speaker 1:
Like I grew up with that for sure, because I had things that bothered me. I always had back pain, I always had stomach pain, I was always constipated as a kid and like my parents were going through a divorce and for sure the doctors were like, hey, there's nothing wrong with your kid, it's all in her head. And I watched that diagnosis being given to my sisters too and it was like, okay, now that I do what I do and I understand where the limbic system is in the brain, for sure there is a huge component about it affecting and triggering things that literally are in your head. It doesn't mean that it's all you're making it up. It doesn't mean that you're crazy and that you just need to shake it off and get over it. It means that something is wrong and that instinct that you have, that instinct that we have that reads a room and says something is not quite right here.
Speaker 2:
There's a couple of different things going on there.
Speaker 1:
It's either that something is really really wrong or that something is trapped.
Speaker 1:
Yes, and your body knows it, it's an intuitive vessel and it wants, and then ultimately, especially if we eventually have the bandwidth sometimes we don't have the bandwidth and it shows up like well, we got to push that back down or if we have the bandwidth and the window of tolerance to process it, then we can really create some deep healing and preparing. Yeah, totally so. Here's the other example I want to share because it goes right along, and this one's more benign, but this teaches about the power of how the body keeps score Vessel van der Kolk. He is an incredible. I mean, the book that he wrote is such an incredible resource for the world and it will continue to ripple into and be connected to somatic therapy for decades, hopefully decades and centuries to come.
Speaker 1:
Everyone who is alive right now needs to read that to understand. And if they don't read his book, he has now hundreds of youtube videos. If you're not familiar with the name of dr bessel van der kolk, look him up because he is one of the giants. Well, there's a lot of giants there, but Dr Peter Levine, Dr Gabor Mate and Dr Bessel van der Kolk are some giants that I built the way that I do somatic therapy around. So Dr Bessel van der Kolk is one of the ones that I refer to. I say no, don't take my word for it, I'm just a therapist in Utah.
Speaker 1:
Listen to this guy Go listen to this guy.
Speaker 1:
He has all the research, he has a big voice. He started a long time ago figuring this stuff out and observing it himself, collecting the data, putting it into the greater knowledge that we have about mental health, and he's come out with these somatic tools that are, I think, so much more effective than what we've had in the past for for helping people with mental health. 1000%, yeah, in the therapy world, if you hear Dr Bessel van der Kolk's name, you know that oh, the body keeps score. And now you're starting to hear that as a catchphrase we talk about things that are stored in the body, like oh the body keeps score. The body keeps score.
Speaker 2:
I'm like, yes, it does yeah, it's such a tagline now and it's beautiful and I hope that it continues to ripple into the world.
Speaker 1:
Beautiful example of something that's more benign in someone's life. It's not causing this, it's not plaguing them. The experience wasn't isn't something that they even remembered in their conscious memory until it was brought up by me working on yeah, and this was strictly a more of a body work appointment. I wasn't even doing any necessary mental health connected with it. Someone had hurt their leg and their foot was hurting and I was just going to unwind the structural debris, right the structural tightness in the muscles and the fascia and help create relief as we released adhesions. So as I went to work off the foot, there was a recoil and it wasn't because the, it was the where I started. It was almost like the act of starting to grab the foot had created that response.
Speaker 1:
And this client looked at me in almost surprise and was like I don't know why I did that. And I said well, I'm also a mental health therapist and that was what looked like a trauma response. So have you ever hurt your foot? Have you ever taken a blow there? Has there been any injury to that foot other than chronic use from the running? Not that I can think of. I said, well, let me gently come back in. So as I gently came back into the foot, this client said oh my gosh, I haven't remembered this forever. His quiet said oh my gosh, I haven't remembered this forever. When I was eight I stepped on a hornet and it stung me. Wow, it hurts so bad because, as a kid it's. If you guys don't know, a bee sting hurts, but a hornet sting is worse, the end of the world putting on a nail, and so it's not like this bee sting experience had forever like made life debility.
Speaker 1:
This wasn't a huge trauma, or even with something that was a trauma in this person's life. It was more of I got hurt and then life went on. But because I was touching that spot and this is the power of the body keeps score it will record every single thing that happened to it and if it hurt you when it happened, it will record a somatic response to that. So we actually so we slowly and gently unwound not just the fashion, the muscles, but also the emotional response that was coming up as this person remembered getting stung by the hornet and then being scared about getting stung more. And it was this whole live memory that then, then now, at the time, at the age this person was that was able to now process and resource better than an eight-year-old can and go. I wasn't safe then because the hornet hurt me. I'm safe today, yeah, and we're okay. And then after that, anyone could touch their foot and there was a papal coil, you know what I think is really beautiful about this.
Speaker 1:
And, and specifically that moment, your patient basically said to you like oh my gosh, I'm embarrassed, almost right. I don't know why I did that, I'm sorry, really wise. And your symptoms, they kind of know that something deeper is going on there. So I'm always surprised by how much my patients will apologize for just simply being in the space and I'm always like no, you belong here, like it's okay, take up your rightful space, like that's why you've come to see me, because you're you're hurting, you're suffering somehow, and I want to, I want to know about every single little thing. And so being able to tell your patients like listen intuitively and when you feel something, come up, when you have this intuition, if a thought pops into your mind, that's so telling.
Speaker 1:
And we're often and like we're given these messages all the time in our culture to be small, yeah, like minimize and, and I get that everybody wants everybody else to behave and that we can't take that example and go like radical with it and be really big and loud and lose our composure. But take up your rightful space in the world and acknowledge what your body is trying to tell you knowledge what your body is trying to tell you. Those are often the avenues to healing and it's, I think, as practitioners, it's really important for us to make sure we lay the groundwork for that when our patients come in to see us, because, man, that's where the gems are. Yes, yeah Well, thanks everybody for joining us, and if you want to connect with me, I'm at the acupuncturist underscore org on Instagram. And if you want to connect with me, I'm at mend M E N D, mend counseling centercom and also Jenny J E N N I E underscore pool P O O L, and that's my Instagram.
Speaker 2:
Thanks. See you next time. Thank you for joining us on unscripted. I'm Jenny pool and I'm Janine Brandy.
Speaker 1:
We hope you found today's discussion as inspiring and insightful as we did. If you have any questions, comments or stories you'd like to, share.
Speaker 2:
We'd love to hear from you. Connect with me on instagram at the acupuncturist, and you'll find me on social media at mend counseling center. Until next time, remember that the best gift you can give to those you love is the gift of your own good health.