I am a registered social worker in private practices and I offer therapy in Hamilton, Ontario. I specialized in body-based approaches to healing trauma. Most of my clients arrive at my practice after having tried a variety of talk therapies. Talk therapy has usually helped them learn to focus on and name their emotions, describe what they need, ask for support, recognize boundaries, and a variety of other very important skills. These skills are an amazing foundation, and they make somatic work much easier and more effective.

So, why do people choose body-based therapies?

For some people, talking about problems doesn’t help–they notice themselves telling the same stories again and again, and not feeling any better. They might even notice that telling the story makes them feel worse. Clients like these are often interested in body-based (also known as somatic) therapies, typically because they experience a lot of their symptoms as physical. They might have tightness in their chests, knots in their stomach, aching in their backs, and other persistent physical symptoms that they know are tied to past experiences but that they can’t quite shake.

Body-based therapies use physical cues from the body in the healing process. In Somatic Experiencing, for example, the therapist will guide the client into “tracking” their felt sensations. These sensations form a “map” in the client’s body, and that map carries a great deal of information–about the painful past, yes, but also about what the client needs to heal. In SE, the process is all about slowing down and listening to the unspoken language of the body.

EMDR is another common body-based therapy. EMDR uses dual attention stimuli, which is a fancy way of saying splitting your attention into two places at once. In order to do this, EMDR therapists actually stimulate one of the client’s senses in the therapy session–either their vision, via moving fingers, or their hearing, via headphones, or their sense of touch via little buzzing hand-held devices. Thus, a client’s attention is split between the painful memories of the past and the safety of the present moment–this builds a “bridge” in the brain, and allows the brain to process traumatic material more effectively.

EMDR and Somatic Experiencing are only two types of body-based therapies. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is another common approach; Emotional Freedom Technique is another. And in many cultures around the world, practitioners use a whole variety of body-focused techniques to help people deal with emotional and mental distress.

If you’re interested to learn more about body-based methods of healing trauma, I recommend Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score.