The information on these pages is not intended, nor should they be interpreted, to provide any medical advice. You should always consult with your own healthcare providers before making any decisions about your mental or medical healthcare.
Somatic Energy Therapy
A new, holistic psychotherapy developed by Jake Pierce-Walsh, MSW, LCSW.
Somatic Energy Therapy operates from the simple idea that our mental health is ultimately about our ability to feel all of our emotions. Just like how a healthy body needs blood to flow, breath to flow, digestion to flow and so on, the same goes for our feelings. When we feel our emotions in ways that allow them to flow through us, we feel better. But while this idea is simple, the experience can be quite challenging. Our body is wired to avoid pain and so, depending on a lot of factors, allowing ourselves to feel emotional pain can be a complicated process. Somatic Energy Therapy helps by offering concepts, beliefs, and practices that support each person’s unique process for finding and feeling their emotions in a safe, grounded way.
Somatic-Based
Somatic, or body-focused, forms of therapy approach healing from the perspective that there’s more to our psychology than just what’s in our head. Offering a more holistic perspective, somatic therapies are interested in the relationships between what we think, believe, and feel and what’s happening in the body. Called “bottom-up processing,” these kinds of therapy find that change occurs, not only through new ideas and perspectives, but by learning to engage and relate to our body’s experience. Once thought to be only useful in treating trauma, somatic forms of therapy have come to be regarded as effective at helping with all kinds of problems, the research showing that when people can feel their experience in their body they are more likely to get better.
Somatic therapies help in different ways, depending on the specific therapy, but generally they tend to help us work with their body’s experience to cultivate a sense of safety and stability inside, so we can move towards the painful experiences we’ve been avoiding without getting overwhelmed. Like most psychological methods, somatic therapies tend to find that when we can connect with what we’ve been avoiding in ways that feel safe and supported, we get better. Different than many therapies, however, somatic therapies tend to be much more informed about our physiology and the mind-body connection, with helping methods that engage the body’s natural healing processes. While initially considered strange or fringe, somatic forms of therapy are largely recognized as sound methods grounded in science.
The foundation of Somatic Energy Therapy is our relationship with the body. By learning to bring our focused attention to our body as well as ground the body to promote stability and internal safety, we are able to access places within us that need healing as well as resources for such healing. This helps us feel emotions in ways that allow them to move through us rather than be stuck inside us due to our own avoidance, judgment, and suppression.
Attachment Theory is a broad concept asserting that the quality of the relationship between parent and child significantly impacts the child in numerous ways throughout their lifespan. First organized into four different relational patterns – secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized – psychology has come to understand these attachment styles as more on a spectrum rather than distinct categories. In the past 30 years attachment theory found footing in biology with Dr. Stephen Porge’s Polyvagal Theory, helping us understanding the impact of the parent-child relationship on the development of the child’s automimic nervous system.
Not surprisingly, attachment theory has found itself at the foundation of many different therapies over the years. Psychodynamic Therapy, Attachment-Based Therapy, and most recently Emotion-Focused Therapy are just a few therapies that rely on attachment theory for how they conceptualize mental health problems and treatment.
Somatic Energy Therapy similarly finds the quality of attachment between parent or caregiver and child to be the central variable when it comes to our mental and emotional health. Recognized the most powerful influence on both our psychology and our biological ability to feel our emotions in a safe, grounded way, Somatic Energy Therapy uses attachment theory as a central component in its own theory of what causes mental and emotional problems, as well as a model for what helps us heal.
Attachment-Informed
Healing methods that understand and work with subtle energy have been around for a long time. Before the medical model different cultures and peoples had their own unique way of connecting and working with unseen energetic aspects of nature, the planet, and our bodies. From Chinese medicine to shamanistic healing practices, the world was immersed in a complementary blend of practical knowledge about the healing potential within nature and the deep energetic interconnections of everything.
Today the medical model is the dominant perspective for healing. It sees the body as essentially a machine to be classified, diagnosed, and treated. Psychology has followed suit, largely reducing our mental and emotional experience to the functioning of our brain and organizing it as either “healthy” or disordered.
The study of subtle energy, however, is making a comeback, reminding us we are much more. Energy Psychology is a broad term describing forms of therapy that engage with subtle energy in some way. First introduced by Roger Callahan with his “Thought-Field Therapy” and later by Gary Craig with “Emotional Freedom Techniques,” otherwise called “tapping,” Energy Psychology modalities have grown significantly over the years.
Somatic Energy Therapy incorporates awareness of subtle energy into many of its concepts and healing methods. Primarily related to grounding, deeper emotional awareness, and beliefs that support greater energetic fluidity, Somatic Energy Therapy finds the study of subtle energy to be the missing link to more fully understanding the mind-body connection in terms of both the problems we face and their solutions.
By helping you learn to ground your body energetically you can discover a new way of cultivating emotional stability and regulation. By developing awareness of emotional energy in and around the body and work with it, you can learn to access and feel emotions in ways that promote healing. By offering beliefs that support greater energetic fluidity, you are introduced to new ways of relating to yourself and your problems that reduce shame, self-judgment, and feeling stuck.