How Somatic Experiencing Helps Regulate the Nervous System: A Trauma-Centered Therapy at the Guest House

According to “Post-traumatic Stress Disorder” from the World Health Organization (WHO), around 70% of people globally will experience at least one traumatic event in their life. Additionally, out of that 70%, 3.9% of the world population will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite the prevalence of trauma, most people will experience a traumatic event and recover without developing PTSD. However, when trauma is unaddressed, it can develop into PTSD and other trauma-related conditions. Thus, holistic treatment modalities like somatic experiencing helps regulate the physical and psychological impact of trauma.

At The Guest House, we know the body stores different kinds of energy that impact functioning. In particular, when it comes to stress and trauma, trauma can get stuck and manifest physically in the body. Trapped trauma can contribute to self-defeating thinking and behavior patterns like substance use disorder (SUD). Therefore, we believe understanding the mind-body relationship between trauma and physical and psychological distress is valuable to recovery. With a greater understanding of trauma, you can see how somatic experiencing helps dismantle trauma to heal.

However, you may question how somatic experiencing helps with trauma. How can trauma physically get stuck in the body? Looking at trauma and the many different types of trauma that exist will highlight the value of somatic experiencing and how it can address trauma you may not even be aware is impacting your well-being.

Understanding Trauma and Trauma Types

According to the article “Trauma” from the American Psychological Association (APA), trauma is an emotional reaction to a threatening event or events that has a prolonged negative impact on your physical, psychological, and social well-being. Trauma can be an incident or series of events that threaten your life, or another person’s life, or is emotionally disturbing. If you do not believe you have experienced trauma, it can be difficult to imagine that trauma has contributed to your challenges with SUD and other mental health disorders.

Further, misconceptions about what trauma is have led people to believe that trauma has not impacted their well-being. Many people think of trauma as sexual assault, sexual abuse, and or exposure to war. Although sexual abuse and war can cause trauma and lead to PTSD, trauma can be vast and complex in its many forms.

Listed below are some of the types of traumas that can impact your well-being:

• Physical abuse: Using physical force that results in injury or puts you in danger
  • Punching
  • Slapping
  • Restraining you
  • Holding you captive
  • Threats to you, your family, or pets
• Sexual abuse: Any action in which you are pressured or coerced to do something sexually
  • Rape
  • Unwanted kissing or touching
  • Restricting your access to contraceptives
  • Voyeurism
• Emotional Abuse: Typically includes non-physical behaviors designed to control, isolate, or frighten you
  • Threats and insults
  • Constant monitoring
  • Intimidation
  • Dismissive
• Traumatic grief: Experiencing post-trauma survival mechanisms during the grieving process
  • Feeling insecure and helpless
  • Loss of trust
  • Feeling anxious and disconnected
• Medical trauma: Your psychological and physiological responses to pain, injury, life-threatening illness, medical procedures, or a frightening treatment experiences
  • Surgery
  • Being diagnosed with cancer
  • Chronic pain
  • Emergency C-section
• Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): Potentially traumatic experiences that occur in childhood like abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, loss of a parent, and separation from a parent
  • Physical neglect: The failure refusal or inability to provide necessary care for physical and psychological well-being
    • Food, clothing, shelter, supervision, and medical care
  • Emotional abuse and neglect: Your emotional needs are purposefully or unconsciously  disregarded, ignored, invalidated, or unappreciated
    • Punishment for expressing negative emotions
    • Invalidating your emotions or experiences
    • Withholding or not showing affection
• Intimate partner violence (IPV): Abuse or aggression that occurs in a current or past romantic relationship
  • Physical and sexual violence
  • Stalking
  • Psychological aggression
• Community violence: Exposure to violence committed in public areas
  • Fights between groups
  • Mass shootings
  • Terrorist attacks
• Complex trauma: Exposure to multiple traumatic events or prolonged trauma
  • Prolonged abuse and or neglect
  • Discrimination like racism and sexism
  • War
• Historical trauma: A type of trauma experienced by a specific cultural, racial, or ethnic group because of major events that have oppressed a particular group based on their status
  • Slavery
  • The Holocaust
  • Trail of Tears

Looking at the many types of trauma showcases the importance of trauma-specific care. Understanding the different kinds of trauma increases your awareness of how trauma may be impacting you. Now you can utilize trauma-specific treatment modalities to help uncover and dismantle trauma. Since trauma, especially unknown trauma, manifests in the body, somatic experiencing helps address that unconscious trauma. Yet, what is somatic experiencing? If somatic experiencing helps with trauma, what does that look like?

What Is Somatic Experiencing?

According to the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, somatic experiencing is a body-oriented therapy designed to address trauma-related disorders like PTSD. Somatic experiencing helps by placing a focus on the psychophysiological consequences of traumatic events. Thus, somatic experiencing helps resolve the symptoms of chronic stress and PTSD. Yet, what does it mean to be a body-oriented therapy? As noted in Frontier in Psychiatry, feeling and connecting to your body is a central part of holistic psychotherapy. There is a focus placed on feeling and connecting to your body because researchers have found that somatic symptoms are often reflections of mental conflicts.

Therefore, body-oriented therapy looks to support greater bodily awareness. With more awareness of your body and your somatic symptoms, you can unlock those difficult-to-reach mental conflicts. As a result, body-oriented therapies like somatic experiencing help modulate emotional processing and regulate your emotions, movement behavior, and bodily self-awareness. However, what does bodily awareness look like in somatic experiencing? What tools does somatic experiencing use to help support bodily awareness and unlock stuck trauma? Somatic experiencing helps address the bodily stress responses born from trauma and traumatic stress.

Some common somatic symptoms of trauma found in the body include:

• Sweating
• Pounding heart
• Rapid breathing
• Shaking
• Muscle tension
• Fatigue and exhaustion
• Difficulty sleeping
• Nausea
• Dizziness
• Headaches

Your traumatic stress symptoms are your body’s stress system’s overreaction to the trauma. An overaction of stress symptoms from trauma is your body struggling to process and effectively respond to significant stress. In other words, your body is stuck in the flight-or-fight stress response system. Thus, your system is in overdrive, which leaves you in a constant state of defense physically and psychologically. Being in a constant state of defense is distressing and overwhelming.

You are unable to process and respond to stress and trauma healthily. With significant psychological strain, you gravitate toward unhealthy coping strategies like substance use to alleviate or suppress your distress. Therefore, understanding the relationship between trauma and the nervous system is important for addressing somatic symptoms.

Relationship Between Trauma and the Nervous System

When you are overwhelmed and exhausted by trauma, it becomes more difficult to build and maintain resilience to typical life stressors. Healing the nervous system can help you address your somatic and psychological trauma symptoms. Yet, how are trauma and the nervous system connected? Many people think of trauma as a physical consequence of harm like scars or as a disproportionate emotional response like jumpiness. However, trauma is also the dysregulation of physiological functioning like an upset stomach, neck pain, and sleep issues.

Somatic symptoms of trauma are a reflection of dysregulation of physiological functioning, which is primarily processed or controlled by the nervous system. In general, as the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) states, the nervous system is how mechanisms inside the body are controlled and how you communicate with the outside world. More specifically, the nervous system is a complex collection of all the nerve cells in your body. The billions of nerve cells or neurons in your body each have their own cell body and extensions. There are short extensions called dendrites and long extensions called axons.

Dendrites and axons work together as dendrites act like antennae receiving signals from other neurons, while axons pass those signals along. Further, as Medline Plus notes, the nervous system is made up of two parts, the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system includes all the nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Within the central nervous system, your brain and spinal cord act as the processing center for the entire nervous system. Thus, the central nervous system controls all your body functions like receiving and processing sensory information and responding with motor output.

For example, the central nervous system controls:

• Thoughts
• Memories
• Emotions
• Behaviors
• Movements
• Breathing
• Digestion
• Learning
• Communicating

Whereas, the peripheral nervous system is made up of all the other nerves in the body. Specifically, the PNS houses all the nerves outside of the brain and spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system itself is made of two parts, the autonomic nervous system and the somatic nervous system. autonomic nervous system controls internal functions that you cannot consciously influence like breathing, digestion, and blood pressure. The somatic nervous system, on the other hand, controls all the functions that you are consciously aware of like muscle movement and sends signals from your ears, eyes, mouth, and skin to the central nervous system.

There is an overlap in the functions of the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system control as the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system coordinate with each other to enact bodily movements like eating and walking. The nervous system alone is a complex collection of nerves with significant influence over the mind and body without trauma. Thus, a delicate and complex system is thrown into disarray when trauma goes unaddressed in the system. Trauma leads to physical and psychological distress that leaves you stuck in the fight-or-flight stress response. Typically, the fight-or-flight response is necessary for safety and survival.

For example, your fight-or-flight response can be triggered when you slam on your breaks to avoid an accident or when you feel nervous about a presentation at school or work. Thus, your fight-or-flight response is not inherently a bad thing as it helps you respond to danger or gives you the courage to do something new. However, trauma causes your flight-or-flight response to malfunction, and your nervous system overreacts to different situations.

In fact, PTSD symptoms like being on guard, feeling on edge, and being jumpy are all somatic manifestations of trauma. Further, when trauma gets stuck in your body as the overstimulated fight-or-flight response, it becomes difficult or impossible to adapt to stressors in your life. Therefore, somatic experiencing helps address the mind-body relationship between trauma and self-defeating thinking and behavior patterns.

How Somatic Experiencing Helps With Symptoms

The somatic symptoms of trauma are an expression of stress activation and an incomplete defensive reaction to traumatic experiences. As a result, to heal trauma and trauma-related conditions, you must release the traumatic activation. Thus, somatic experiencing can be invaluable when you are overwhelmed by psychological distress that manifests as physical symptoms and self-defeating thinking and behavior patterns. As stated in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, somatic experiencing takes a unique approach to trauma by integrating body awareness. Somatic experiencing helps create awareness of your inner physical sensations, which carry traumatic memories.

By deepening your awareness of your body and physical sensations, you increase your tolerance for body sensations and related emotions. With greater tolerance of body sensations and traumatic emotions, you can decrease your traumatic stress response. Somatic experiencing helps decrease your physical response to trauma through a bottom-up approach to body awareness.

A bottom-up approach focuses on taking in sensory data detected by your senses. Then the sensory data you pick up from your senses is integrated and processed by the brain. With trauma, a bottom-up approach focuses on bodily sensations as trauma in the body’s memory.

Listed below is how a bottom-up processing approach works in somatic experiencing:

• Greater awareness of your body sensations
  • You will learn how to recognize how different parts of your body feel
    • Feelings sensations like muscle tension in your neck or back
• Recognizing the connection between those bodily sensations and stress
  • You focus on noticing the bodily sensations that come up when you are stressed
  • Or focusing on how you feel when the bodily sensations come up
    • Feeling tightness in your shoulders
    • Having an upset stomach
    • Feeling shaky
    • Having a headache
• Focusing more on positive body sensations, thoughts, and memories
  • You learn how to release negative energy and embrace positive energy with guided imagery
    • Through guided imagery, you imagine a deeply detailed scene using all of your senses
      • The vivid image you imagine should be focused on a positive feeling like a relaxing or happy scene
        • Practicing guided imagery supports deep relaxation and helps you gain insight into yourself from a more positive frame of mind

Looking at the bottom-up process of somatic experiencing speaks to the value of understanding the body to support healing trauma.

Somatic Experiencing Helps Trauma-Specific Issues at The Guest House

At The Guest House, we believe in providing a highly personalized treatment plan to address your specific needs. With holistic trauma-specific treatment modalities like somatic experiencing, you can discover the right path to recovery for you. Somatic experiencing helps address your specific experiences with trauma to dismantle self-defeating thinking and behavior patterns. Trauma’s impact on your nervous system can profoundly impair physiological areas of function. Disruptions to your nervous system from trauma can contribute to poor physical and psychological health outcomes.

Thus, an individualized trauma-specific treatment program is invaluable to addressing co-occurring challenges. Moreover, a holistic trauma-specific approach offers a wide range of modalities that acknowledge your unique experiences and needs to heal. With access to a variety of accessible mind-body interventions, healing does not start and stop with your symptoms alone. True healing from a holistic approach makes space to heal the whole of your parts in mind, body, and spirit. No matter where you are on your recovery journey, somatic experiencing helps you build a meaningful life in long-term recovery.

Exposure to trauma, especially interpersonal, violent, and multiple and or prolonged trauma can increase your risk for psychological distress. When left unaddressed, trauma can overwhelm your nervous system and leave you feeling stuck in survival mode. You get stuck in the fight-or-flight stress response, which manifests as physical somatic symptoms and psychological distress. Your trauma symptoms contribute to self-defeating thinking and behavior patterns like SUD and other mental health disorders. However, somatic experiencing helps as a trauma-specific therapy to heal trauma through the mind-body connection. Therefore, At The Guest House, we are committed to providing a holistic individualized treatment plan to help you connect with your inner self to heal. Call us at (855) 483-7800 to learn more today.