How is Somatic Therapy Different than Talk Therapy?
Meaning of "Somatic"
The word “somatic” literally means “relating to the body as opposed to the mind,” according to Cambridge Dictionary. In sum, somatic therapists seek to create experiences in sessions (as opposed to talking about issues from a distance) that integrate your body, nervous system, and brain altogether.
Healing from the Inside Out
Somatic therapy doesn’t exclude the mind, but it prioritizes healing through the body first, allowing for our systems (body/mind/spirit) to heal from the inside out, holistically. And if that sounds a little too “woo-woo” for you, let me add a bit of science to support how powerful somatic therapy can be.
How We Process New Information in Therapy
When a person starts going to therapy, they’re obviously looking to change something in their life.
Maybe they feel bogged down because anxiety won’t release them from worrying about thousands of worst-case-scenarios, or maybe they walk around with a nagging sense that they aren’t good enough, exhausting themselves trying to please everyone (but actually pleasing no one).
Common Important Questions in Therapy
Whatever the case, therapy offers a space for people to confront these difficult questions:
What existing information/ideas do I have about myself, the world, and other people?
How are these holding me back or keeping me stuck in the same loop of feeling bad?
What new information can help me feel better and get me into new patterns?
When I use the word information, I technically mean data, and as humans, we don’t only process data through our minds, but also through our bodies and senses. In general, we process information in two different ways: “bottom-up” and “top-down.”
Understanding Top-Down Processing
Top-down processing is when your brain uses logic, planning, and existing knowledge to understand incoming stimuli (anything in your environment - a conversation, an Insta post, a sound you don’t recognize) and to fill in the gaps of any information that is missing from that stimuli (Drew, 2023).
For example, you might overhear someone’s podcast on the subway, but only pick up the words “... York City’s streets are filled with rioters, looters, and Antifa, who…” – and your existing knowledge of American politics will fill in all kinds of ideas about who this listener is and what they believe. One word that simplifies top-down processing: perception, using cognition to integrate new information into concepts and ideas you already know.
Understanding Bottom-Up Processing
Bottom-up processing works in an opposite way, as the name suggests. Bottom up processing begins with taking in real-time data from our bodies through our senses, as opposed to beginning with concepts/models/frameworks from our brains (Rousay, 2023).
To use the subway guy example, bottom-up processing allowed light rays reflecting his body and clothes to reach your retinas, which encoded the data through your ocular nerves and brain as one cohesive image. The sound waves from his podcast vibrated tiny hairs in your ears, which sent nerve impulses from the inner ear to the brain so that you registered those sound waves as his voice. Another word to simplify this concept: sensation, the raw information your body sends you as you move through the world.
How Somatic Therapy Works
Somatic therapy seeks to create experiences in session that generate new sensory data that re-wires neurological patterns. This can alleviate symptoms of anxiety and depression, and if done well, heal trauma. In other words, somatic therapy uses “bottom-up” processing to incorporate new data into your entire psychological and biological system so you not only have insight but feel better emotionally and physically.
Somatic Therapy vs. Traditional Talk Therapy
How Talk Therapy Works
Both traditional and somatic therapy are big umbrellas, with many specific frameworks and methods of working (or as we therapists say, modalities) within those big umbrellas. However, the main difference between talk and somatic therapy, is the type of processing that is prioritized and worked with between both client and therapist to support the client’s healing.
Talk therapy prioritizes top-down processing, i.e. exploratory conversation about the client’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The therapist relies on both the relationship they cultivate with their client and their expertise to reflect the information the client already has, find new ways of looking at old information, or point out where faulty assumptions might be holding a client back.
Talk therapy rests primarily on the idea that we all create belief systems about the world, ourselves, and relationships through formative, early experiences, and that if we can talk through, understand, and adjust those beliefs with the support and expertise of a therapist, then we will respond to life differently, create new experiences (and new data) which help us to ultimately feel better.
Challenges in Talk Therapy
One of the pitfalls of traditional talk therapy is that our brains are VERY adept at blocking out new information that threatens us, even if it may be helpful for us in the long run. Our brains are very invested in using energy efficiently, which often translates to preferring “the devil you know,” or in more clinical terms, preferring your own cognitive biases (Cherry, 2024). When new information threatens old ways of thinking, your mind pulls out the proverbial psychological shields to block the new data, i.e. defense mechanisms.
Experienced, skilled talk therapists know how to spot, empathically confront, and disarm these defenses in order to help their clients grow and heal. However, disarming a person’s defenses requires not only skill, but trust between the therapist and client, and this is one reason that feeling better can take a significant amount of time.
Before I was trained as a somatic therapist, I often found my clients encountering a lot of self-judgment in the early-middle stages of talk therapy - they had the knowledge and insight why their emotions and defenses manifested as they did, but didn’t yet have the felt sense of groundedness or the new skills to behave in new ways.
How Somatic Therapy Works Differently
In contrast, somatic therapy prioritizes bottom up-processing over top-down. So what does that mean exactly? That means prioritizing affective and somatic experiences, i.e. emotional and physical experiences, over talking about and analyzing past experiences (Fosha, 2000).
In essence, a somatic therapist’s goal is to engage both the body and the mind simultaneously by supporting the client’s ability to feel their true emotional experience in connection with someone else, allowing the client to access emotions, ideas, and thoughts that they carried alone and that kept them stuck.
The Client’s Process in Somatic Therapy
In my experience as a somatic therapist, each client’s process of re-connecting with their emotions and learning to understand their body’s language (how emotions show up physically as sensation) looks very different from person to person.
Some people prefer to follow physical sensations, which will lead them to memories associated with those emotions. Others are more visual, and will see their emotions and physical sensations as specific images that transform as they continue to follow their internal experience.
As a somatic therapist, my role is to witness and guide each client in becoming experts in understanding and responding to their entire system (body, mind, spirit) from an authentic and compassionate place.
Somatic Therapy = Experience, not Analysis
A metaphor I heard in a recent AEDP training encapsulates the difference between talk and somatic therapy well: if your emotional experience was represented by body of water, talk therapy positions the client and the therapist sitting together at the edge, on dry land, looking at the water from afar and observing its qualities to understand it differently.
Somatic therapy asks both the client and the therapist to GET IN the water, with the trust between therapist and client as a reliable, affirmative, and supportive life raft. At first, the client might be terrified of swimming, or have NO IDEA what scary predators lie beneath the surface.
The therapist’s role is to guide the client into the water at their own pace, so that the client eventually can learn to navigate its waves, the depths, and temperatures. Over time, the client will learn that they can fully submerge and experience their emotions, only to come out feeling revitalized and refreshed.
If you’re curious about how somatic therapy could help you, book a consult call today!
