“The memory came out of nowhere!” ….or maybe it didn’t. Why this is something that quite commonly happens in a somatic session and why could it be useful?

“Trauma isn’t the event, it is the response”

During somatic work, it is not unusual that memories from the past which we didn’t consciously remember or think of re-surface. Sometimes those are quite significant things that have happened to us, but sometimes they are not. Because it is not the “size” of an event that matters, but the impact it had on us at that time it happened and how well resourced were we to process that event. That's why very often as we tap into our unconscious mind, it takes us to the roots of where our reactions to certain emotions were made which then allows us to not just work on the root cause, but to reduce the impact that these unconscious reactions may have on us in the present. As we are able to reduce charge around the original event and increase our tolerance to stay with an emotion which may have been too painful or overwhelming to be fully processed in the past, we are able to change the way we respond to other similar events in the future leading into better cognitive and behavioral outcomes.

There is a photo of my sweet little girl Roya and it is there for a reason. Because while I think it is important to understand the “why’s” behind the things that we do, it is usually the “how” which allows us to truly relate to what has been said. So I want tie in the “why” with a practical example of the how which she is a big part of.

Photo by Jassu Dammert

Since already some time now, I have been experiencing waves of overwhelming grief about the fact that one day she will no longer be here. So while cognitively I understand that it does not make any sense to grieve someone who is still here, it doesn’t change the way I feel. And as we humans have the tendency to do, I have pushed that aside as it has felt like something which would completely swallow me if I gave it more room in order to keep functioning in this world. But while both; our physiology as well as our psychology has provided us with the ability to defend against overwhelming emotional experiences which might compromise our survival, these same defenses may compromise our health and well being in the long run.

So the other day, as we were walking in nature, like we do every day, I felt another wave of grief. It felt as overwhelming as always, but this time around, rather than pushing it aside, I stayed with it. I felt it mostly around my face and my eyes which made it feel un-tolerable. So I placed my hand at the back of my neck and immediately felt the emotion spreading down into my chest and abdomen. Feeling it in a larger area of my body made it feel more tolerable to stay with. The back of the neck is a very common place where we might store physical defenses toward emotions, so gentle self touch may help release some of these defenses and therefore make those emotions more available for us to experience in the larger container of the body. The more concentrated a negative emotion is to only one area of the body, the more intense the experience of it usually is. So it often helps if we can spread the emotion to a larger area, so that we can stay with it longer and therefore increase our tolerance toward it.

Not after long, I felt how the sensation was connected with the sense of an ending of something, but it didn’t feel like it was actually about her. Then a memory came up of someone close slowly fading away and the grief of it being an ending of something. So I stayed with it until I felt a discharge of that energy. After staying with the embodied experience of that emotion and allowing my brains to fully process it the cognitive realization followed that I started experiencing these waves of grief since she had a surgery and I had to witness her in very voulnerable state without me being able to do anything to help her. So just understanding how my brains were connecting these experiences of similarity, causing the same emotional responses, was already helpful in itself to reduce the charge around the emotion. A common misunderstanding over somatic work is the idea that the aim is to completely disconnect from the cognitive brain. Rather, somatic approaches emphasize the mind-body connection by integrating awareness of body sensations with cognitive processes for to improve processing and integration of un-processed experiences. While the right-brain gathers information over what has been sensed, the left-brain makes sense of what has been sensed. So the goal is eventually to improve bi-hemispheric communication in the brains in order to improve emotional regulation which then in turn, enhances cognitive and behavioural functions, allowing an individual to better cope in situations which they might have found being difficult before. What else might need to happen from a physiological perspective in order for this to be fully true? That would deserve a whole other article, as that is eventually how Postural restoration can step in to help improve bi-hemispheric communication by making sure that a person has access to their full sensory experience and balanced autonomic nervous system function.

So then in the evening, I noticed her being particularly affectioned. Not in a way that she sometimes does which is showing up more as a need to be close to me in order to self soothe, but more as that she was showing how she just really wanted to be in my presence. She also didn’t engage in her normal behavior or trying to get a second and a third serving of food, but instead she was being calmer than normal. So it hit me how I might have been closing her off because I could not tolerate the painful emotion of fear of losing her and therefore she was engaging in self-soothing behaviors because she could sense the dysregulation in my system and was trying to find ways to calm herself down. When we shut our bodies down as our emotional experience becomes too much to bare, our ability to process difficult emotional experiences becomes impaired which is vital so that we can stay open and connected in our close relationships. This impaires our ability to effectively communicate, regulate and to be regulated, which negatively affects our close relationships or we may struggle to form them.

Reducing the impact that an event is having on an individual in the present

So does this mean that the problem has been “solved”? Sometimes visiting a memory from the past only once which is causing us to respond in a particular way to an emotion or to a similar situation triggering a similar emotional response in the present, will be enough to change our responses in the now. But most often it is not. Most often the process is about making little shifts toward a more positive direction which in the long run become “the solution” as we slowly build our tolerance toward an emotion which may have felt unbearable in the past. Emotions are assessments over how a situation affects our wellbeing. So when we are faced with an emotion, we respond to it in a way that maximizes our well-being and minimizes threats. These adaptive responses are generated through multiple physiological changes in the brain and in our physiology also called our coping strategies. But what if these coping strategies are not serving us anymore?

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