Somatic Techniques to Support the Nervous Systems

You know that our bodies hold our trauma, but they also hold the key to healing from it. By working with clients to tap into the body’s first language – movement – you can help them access what is held in the body so they can move with and beyond their trauma stories.

As therapists, we can learn to read this nonverbal language of movement to understand what is beneath our clients’ stories. Movement can be a diagnostic and therapeutic tool we can use to intervene and help regulate a trauma activation or facilitate working through a stuck emotion. It can be something we utilize to explore, lead, mirror, and join.

That’s why I wrote Trauma-Sensitive Movement: 96 Somatic Techniques to Support Nervous System Regulation and Embodied Transformation in Therapy—to help any therapist wanting to skillfully use movement as an intervention.

In the trauma field, there’s a large emphasis on “soothe and settle,” which is critical in establishing internal safety. What is less practiced is how to integrate the whole spectrum of our movement expressions. Big expressive emotions that are not easily soothed or settled need a different engagement, as do subtle intrinsic movements.

So, what’s the key to transformation?

From my decades of clinical experience, I believe that reading the body as being movement itself and learning how to meet the client’s range of expression is where the magic happens. When we can learn to read what the client needs and tailor exercises to work with the moving body as a gateway into emotions and deeply held beliefs, that’s where trauma recovery happens.

Seven Reasons to Bring Movement into Therapy

1. You bring variation to your therapy work.
2. You offer deeper somatic trauma-resolution techniques.
3. Clients who are kinesthetic will feel met and valued.
4. The work is more effective because you expand on your relational interventions.
5. It’s diagnostic. You can literally read the moving body to identify where there is stuck, unprocessed trauma.
6. You learn to track a moving body telling unspoken stories that offer clues as to how the client interacts in the world and how they perceive themselves, others, and their past.
7. Movement makes us more empathic. Our mirror neurons begin firing when we see movement, and by being with movement we better understand the client’s inner world, which sometimes holds unexplainable, unspeakable horrors. Movement is a direct line of communication to these events—and to healing.

I’m excited for this new toolbox to be released in February... but you can be the first to read chapter one and download some exercises from the book here!