The body’s wisdom… 5 interventions for building somatic awareness.
Healing work in western medicine has had the mind cut off from the body for way too long! Thankfully, over the past few years more and more scientific research has emerged showing as that our memories, experiences and emotions are stored at a cellular level in the body. News just in… it’s not just all in your head! Matters of the mind will also have a somatic (body-based) presentation.
Bessel van der Kolk - The Body Keeps the Score
“We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past, it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain and body.”
Talking about trauma and understanding what happened is often not enough to help survivors of trauma feel healed. Trauma is more than a ‘brain-based’ issue, and experiences of trauma may leave the body with unconscious beliefs and pain that are not accessible via cognitive approaches, as well as a disconnection from the body’s wisdom.
Interoception: The 8th sense
To most people, paying attention to what is happening in the body and for us may seem like second nature. Individuals who have experienced trauma, often have difficulty naming how they are feeling, or do not have awareness of their bodily sensations and emotions.
Interoception awareness is the ability to identify, access, understand and respond skillfully to the patterns of internal signals. It is the sense that allows us to tune in and regulate the physical sensations within our body, such as heart beat, respiration, satiety, thirst, pain, pleasure, warmth, nausea, etc.
A person’s interoception experience can be derailed as a result of trauma, whether that is in childhood or as an adult. Trauma may lead to a muted inner experience where some people are completely dissociated from their bodies. For some who have experienced trauma they may have the opposite experience, and have an intense inner experience and report body signals as intense and overwhelming. Many people across the spectrum of experiences will have a fluctuating inner experience and have a mix of body signals being too small or too big.
Individuals who have difficulty with interoception may experience:
never feeling thirsty / hungry or always feel thirsty / hungry
have difficulty recognising and communicating internal body states (eg. hot/cold, pain etc)
be distracted by internal sensory input and unable to communicate it (eg. ear ringing)
incontinence
difficulty regulating emotions
Individuals who have experienced trauma, have mental health and/or eating disorders, and are neurodivergent are more likely to have difficulty with interoception.
5 interventions for building somatic awareness.
For individuals who have experienced trauma, and/or have low levels of safety and stability in their lives, it may be more useful and safe to explore practices to build somatic awareness with an experienced trauma therapist.
Here are 5 ways that we can build bodily / somatic awareness and learn the body’s wisdom.
Interoception activities. Practicing regular body scans and bringing focus to zones of the body with intent to notice one’s internal self - the muscular system, breathing, heart rate, temperature, urge impulses, touch can increase interoceptive awareness. Using contract and relax movements throughout the body, can also be helpful to build awareness of bodily changes.
Get descriptive. Trauma memories can get processed as long as you can tract, contact, describe and allow the experience to move through you. It is helpful to use as much description as possible and to stay with the sensation occurring in the body. Expanding on “I feel anxious”, to “I am noticing my stomach tying itself in knots, and a swirling rush in my chest” will also help shift the awareness to the body sensation, instead of the upsetting event.
Resourcing to strengthen sense of stability and safety. We can resource ourselves by looking at people, relationships, experiences and places that strengthen a sense of safety and choice. These may be protective, wise, nurturing and joyful. When we know what it feels like in our bodies when those images come up, those feel-good experiences can be our resources later when we need an anchor to drop in difficult moments.
Grounding in the Here-and-Now. Being grounded is the ability to experience our full selves as connected, ‘embodied’, and experiencing ourselves in the world around us. Grounding tools help us to regulate our nervous systems when we have been triggered, and helps us to come back into the present and our bodies. A common grounding with the senses activity is the 5-4-3-2-1.
5 things you can see
4 things you touch
3 things you can hear
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste.
Movement - Moving our bodies are a highly effective way to move through past traumas and intense emotions. When we have found ourselves frozen or numb, the simple act of moving can help activate our sympathetic nervous system and help to bring us into our bodies and the present. The movement could be as simple as clenching and releasing fists, moving the head from side-to-side, or raising and dropping heels.
The Dawn is here to support you. Reach out if you would like support to work on healing trauma, or working towards recovery from mental and bodily dis-ease.
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Written by Nicole Staats
Principal Counsellor - The Dawn