How Somatic Therapy Says it Works

“Somatic therapies posit that our body holds and expresses experiences and emotions, and traumatic events or unresolved emotional issues can become ‘trapped’ inside.” “…somatic therapy is more about relieving the tension, as opposed to desensitizing people to it”. Amanda Baker, director of the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders and a clinical psychologist in the department of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. [Source: What is Somatic Therapy, Harvard Health Publishing]

Effectively, since the mind affects the body, problems with the mind will also affect the body, and so it follows that affecting the body should also affect the mind.

In researching Somatic Therapy, I couldn’t find a good mechanistic description for how Somatic Therapists think that it works that didn’t involve psychobabble (words that seem meaningful, but have no agreed upon meaning), or circular reasoning – A is like B, because B is like A.

The Actual Science

What we experience passes through a filter that determines if the experience was important, understood, and may be useful in the future. Those which are considered important (usually due to moderate to strong feelings), understood (cognitively processed for predictive meaning), and may be useful for the future (expectation of a repeat, often through experiencing it repeatedly) are stored. Those stored memories are used to help determine if the current situation we are in, or a predicted future situation, is ‘Safe’ or ‘Not Safe’. The detection of ‘Not Safe‘ primes our body to take action (arousal), with the default options Freeze, Fawn, Flight and Fight. If we have a better options stored (memory), then we will often try that first. The ‘Not Safe‘ situations and the options available for those appear to be stored mostly in the limbic region (middles brain, thalamus and hypothalamus).

We remember more than just ‘Not Safe‘. Those memories are stored in other parts of the brain.

If the event was not important, or not well understood, or not expected to ever repeat, we are not likely to store that memory.

Our muscles do not actually have any memory mechanism. What we call ‘muscle memory‘ is networks of activation stored in the brain.

It is fair that remaining ‘on edge‘ is a form of ‘constant arousal‘ that can lead to tensed muscles. A good massage can be both relaxing for the muscles, and through the released biochemicals of the massage, elevate levels of endorphins that can help a person ‘stand down‘ for most people. I wouldn’t call that a ‘Somatic Therapy‘ though.

Enough stress can lead to your metabolism and immune system shutting down. Ideally this is temporary, and once the stressor has passed, it starts again. If the stressor, or stressors, continue though, there is speculated that the constant high system arousal can lead to constant fight / flight with compromised metabolism and immune system. This is speculation though, as it is hard to do good research on.

Despite the low amount of research and poor evidence, there are many practitioners who will swear that ‘trauma causes everything’. To be fair, that isn’t quite their phrasing, however when you look at the aetiology of psychiatric disorders, almost all of them say “trauma“, and when you look at the comorbid body diagnoses, they’ll tell you that is related to – despite a large percentage of people who are in the psychiatric system for more than 2 years being Autistic and ADHDers, which is biological, congenital and neurological.

What that results in is, there is likely to be small body of people who are suffering from poor physiological health as a result of traumatic experiences in the absence of congenital and otherwise biological causes. For this cohort, it is worthy considering methods to address their biological symptoms to bring ease. It doesn’t make sense, though, to think that this will logically change in any significant way the psychiatric condition, especially when we consider that Somatic Therapy’s ‘mind body techniques‘ to release damaging, pent-up emotions, are acupressure (aka acupuncture, a pseudoscience), hypnosis (therapeutically a pseudoscience), breathwork (can be useful in the rumble stage) and dance (not mechanical reason why this would be better than just walking).

I will certainly vouch for improved interoception – better awareness of what your body is feeling and what these feelings can tell you about your situation and guide your actions.