Soma Consulting
Body-Centered/Somatic Work
A Departure from Traditional Approaches
Standard talk therapy is often a “cognitive forward” process where the goal is to understand the “why” or discover the “cause” of distressing moods or behaviors. It relies on an analytic foundation, often with the therapist pointing out what the client might be missing. In this model, the therapist is the expert. The goal is to make the unconscious conscious, and insight is the primary tool for this. Some clients can feel stuck, as they take direction and try to think their way out of something they did not think their way into.
Body-Centered work I offer is not therapy. It is a distinct break from “figuring it out” and a move towards experience instead of an explanation. Like conventional therapy, the goal is still to integrate unconscious parts, but it does so from the client’s felt experience. It is more discovery than being directed, more “being with” than “getting to.” A core foundation of body-centered work is that we figure out how to experience the world before language or rational thought - that what we can intellectually know and articulate is only a part of who we are. Our body holds all of us, and the “body keeps score.”
“ MR DUFFY LIVED A SHORT DISTANCE FROM HIS BODY.”
While James Joyce wrote this a while ago, it applies to many of us today. Joyce understood the difference between thinking about our body and being in our body. When most people focus on their body, it is often for a couple of reasons: to keep it healthy or to recover from illness or injury. However, this physical envelope that contains us is the only way we experience the world. As children, our first language was sensations; we did not have the words for the internal dialogue that so commonly defines who we think we are as adults. Before we had language, we made sense of our experience in a wholly somatic way. Most people have at one time or another “lost” themselves in an activity or sensory experience. Those that meditate might be acquainted with fleeting moments of being fully present. There can not only be a great relief in escaping our never-ceasing thinking self, but also great insights to be gained by accessing our felt experience. Our bodies are not just the Space Suit that holds us in the universe but a personal and current record of how we uniquely organize the world. I speak from personal experience when I say it is difficult to rediscover and trust in the body as a source of wisdom, a way of knowing. However, nothing else has the capacity for foundational grounding like the body and allowing us to belong to ourselves.
