Understanding our physiology
Somatic Psychology is a new metaphor for something I believe, we as humans innately understand. Our entire physiology holds our story, our trauma and our heritage. This field is thriving with understanding from many traditions and many practitioners. I believe that this work can challenge the status quo of fractured and deeply problematic Western approaches to trauma, the mind and humanity.
We are not just human minds, but bodies and blood and fluid and magic, ancestors and culture, survival and social engagement systems. We are the plants we eat and evolved with. We are the oceans we once swam in before we learned to walk on land. We are stardust, as they say. And yet in this era, we are often so caught in the trance of separateness and isolation. We have lost site of our animal nature and caged ourselves and the other incarnate beings around us. Somatic and animist psychology is about getting free, working towards collective liberation and unwinding the stories our bodies hold that cage us still.
Below I have included some quotes and resources of individuals who have influenced my approach to this work.
adrienne maree brown
“We are socialized to see what is wrong, missing, off, to tear down the ideas of others and uplift our own. To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses.” Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
“Liberated relationships are one of the ways we actually create abundant justice, we understand that there is enough attention, care, resource and connection for all of us to access belonging, to be in our dignity, and to be safe in community.” Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
Bessel van der Kolk
“The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing and moving, and touch; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.
When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.” The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Susan Raffo
“Healing is about taking the time to notice what gets in the way of feeling connected to your life, your community and your sense of possibility. Healing at its core is about slowing down so that we can better listen, to ourselves and each other.”
Resmaa Menakem
“Years as a healer and trauma therapist have taught me that trauma isn’t destiny. The body, not the thinking brain, is where we experience most of our pain, pleasure, and joy, and where we process most of what happens to us. It is also where we do most of our healing, including our emotional and psychological healing. And it is where we experience resilience and a sense of flow.”
“All of this suggests that one of the best things each of us can do—not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren—is to metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants, via healthy DNA expression. In contrast, when we don’t address our trauma, we may pass it on to future generations, along with some of our fear, constriction, and dirty pain.”
Alaine D. Duncan & Kathy L. Kain
“Traumatic stress knows no geographic, chronological or personal boundaries. Service members don’t check their wartime experiences at the door when they leave a combat zone. People who have survived…an assault don’t leave that experience behind when they leave a hospital. For years after the actual event, the tendrils of such experiences remain alive in cognitive memory and oftentimes more vividly in body memory. To the survivor, the event may feel very much in the here and now, instead of the “there and then.” The survivor may live as if still under attack. Trauma’s impact is far-reaching and vibrational in nature, no only for the individual survivor but also for whole families and communities, who can also be affected by trauma’s impact on any one of their members.
Many survivors come to care providers with elusive, intangible, and difficult-to-pin-down symptoms such as insomnia; chronic pain; metabolic and digestive disturbances; obesity; problems with memory, cognition or mood; interpersonal challenges; autoimmune illnesses; or endocrine disorders. The roots of many of these symptoms lie in autonomic nervous system dysregulation caused by traumatic stress—known or unknown, spoken or unspoken.
Our approach is primarily bottom-up, starting in the body and moving up to the mind. The problem with the “talking cure” for trauma survivors is that the trauma itself gets in the way of survivors reflecting on theri experience. No matter how much cognitive insight or understanding survivors develop in their frontal cortex, their emotional limbic midbrain and most primal brain stem are unable to embrace a different reality.”
-The Tao of Trauma, Introduction