How to do Somatic Work that Actually Makes Change

As we all know, Somatic work is on trend because of it’s ability to go deeper than just the cognitive brain. I happen to be a Somatic Psychotherapist and I when I created SomaField, my signature approach to transformational work, I made Somatic + Experiential one of the core principles, since I see it have such success with clients.

Because so many of us have experienced somatic work as a client or know of it peripherally, a lot of practitioners are now trying somatic methods with their clients. This is great! I love this! But I’ve also seen it fall flat without a thorough understanding of what we’re actually doing and why we’re doing it.

The sort of infamous “where do you feel that in your body?” can be cringe and practitioners can sometimes not know where to go from there.

So I thought I’d offer some understanding of this process and some ways to practice it with clients.

Let’s say a client is sharing how they tend to feel alone and unsupported in relationships and it appears it’s a pattern for them. This is my cue that this is likely a repeat of a childhood pattern with their caregivers or other close family members.

So I might ask them when is the earliest time they remember feeling this way. Accessing memory can be a way to bring in the imagination, sensation, and the body. Often, clients will report that there’s not a specific event (though sometimes there is), but it’s more of a sense they had during their childhood.

If this is the case, going slowly and staying in feeling, I’ll invite them to drop into the memory of that sense and tell me about it. What are the clues in their sensory perception? What do they notice in the memory of their outside environs as well as in their body?

Asking them about what they notice about their body helps them not only get present, but it also accesses a deeper place because often the mind is set to distract or minimize, while the clench in the belly or the heart rate escalation signals to the client that this is real.

When the client can report the body sensation, they can be more connected with it and we can also show them that it’s ok to sit with it by our presence with them. We don’t treat their feelings as an emergency, something to be solved, or something to get out of. We sit together in acknowledgement of it and we let them describe it, feel around and explore it, and register whatever truths they’re understanding about their experience.

This could be the very first time that the client has fully felt this or understood something about their early experience, which can be an important part of their self story, so we use our attunement, the synchronous field, and our artistry to stay with it for as long as it feels needed without rushing them out of it.

This is a beautiful process, but if it’s all we ever do, we have a client who’s building a lot of self awareness about their patterns and where they come from, but they’re not necessarily having any kind of corrective emotional experience that would create a different result in their present-day life.

So this is where we can use imagination while still working experientially and somatically. After the client has spent enough time with the feelings or memory, enough to have inhabited it and felt its impact, we can start to offer that which was missing.

When a client has an experience of early emotional pain, it’s because there was an unmet need. In this example, the client’s need is to feel a sense of support and togetherness in relationships. If the client reported to me as we start to explore it that they just have this sense of sort of being on their own…like their parents were preoccupied elsewhere and they remember being in their room on their own a lot, I might ask them what they were doing in there.

They’ll tell me and I might ask, “Do you think it would be ok if I came and sat in the room with you?” (If they say no, you can check if you could be out in the yard or someplace else that’s not too close but not too far away). If they say yes, you can let them know that you’re just going to sit on the edge of the bed and they’re imagining this right along with you.

Go slowly and ask them how it is to have you there. Let them report back emotions, body sensations, and anything else about their experience. From this, you’ll get information about your next moves…whether it’s better to get closer (like maybe hold their hand in their imagination), get further away (move across the room), etc.

What you’re working towards, through all the peaks and valleys of their emotional expeience, is to give them a felt sense of someone being there with them. They’re not alone. This is important because it’s the seed of change. Even if a client only feels the need being met for a single instant, the memory of that now lives inside them, which means they can access it when they need it, when the old pattern comes up, or when they’re trying to understand something in their present-day life.

That seed of feeling not alone and feeling supported can be the beginning of them making new kinds of choices that align with that feeling.

It’s important to remember as you work with imagination and just with clients in general, that they get to have ultimate control in terms of how close or how far away you are both in their imagination and in real life. When you can show them that it’s not personal and you’re there to simply respond to their need, that also likely offers them a correction from the way things have been in the past and can be very healing, wholing, and validating.

Try working with imagination to help create healthy scenarios for your clients. But only after they’ve sat with the feelings around it enough to not feel rushed into making it better.

Please forward this to anyone that comes to mind if you think they’d enjoy it. :)