Somatic therapy for chronic pain proves there’s more than one way to heal.
That concept is at the heart of somatic therapy. And when it comes to healing from chronic pain, the relief this kind of therapy brings is keenly unique and transformational.
Understanding your pain and potential relief within a body-centered framework is vital for many somatic therapy participants. Working with a qualified therapist, you may even come to understand your discomfort as stuck, unresolved responses to a difficult past or trauma.
Are you are suffering tense, twisted muscles or aching joints. Are your gut or other organs in frequent distress? If so, your chronic situation has likely changed you. It may feel as though pain is just something you do.
Pain like that can make life complicated and fraught with negative fallout as you attempt to feel like yourself. In fact, you may have even come to believe that your pain state is how things are now and wonder if a change is really even possible.
That’s fair. Somatic therapy for chronic pain can have that effect. After a while, feeling any different can be difficult to imagine.
Just know, somatic therapy acknowledges the powerful connection between your body and your brain. Its methods are introduced gently, with the primary goal of transforming your pain from stuck and unprocessed to relieved and resolved.
This is often eye-opening and a source of hope. Hope, which may have been in short supply amid your long period of aches and pain.
In short, It’s time to get the real you back into your body and move pain out.
3 Ways Somatic Therapy for Chronic Pain Gets You Back in Your Body
In specific ways, you and your somatic therapist can examine and renegotiate your nervous system’s responses to the stress, trauma, physical injury, and medical illness that support your chronic pain. Here are several ways how:
1. Somatic therapy for chronic pain:
Increase your bodily awareness
Somatic therapy can help improve your ability to truly sense your own body internally. You will have the opportunity to observe and appreciate its present state and changing sensations. In a safe, focused manner, you can pay attention to how your body feels, works, and how its parts relate to each other. This process is often called interoception.
As you work with your therapist, you will expand your bodily awareness. Slowly, you can build improved tolerance for the physical sensations linked with the current pain. In addition, you’ll tune into the sensations connected with tension and release, stretching, motion, inhalation, and exhalation. All the while you develop language to accurately describe what you are feeling (tingling, stinging, achy).
2. Somatic therapy for chronic pain: Recognize and disrupt painful patterns
Chronic pain is often cyclical and prone to generating more pain. Why? When you hurt all the time that discomfort triggers fear and anxiety. You tense at the thought of more pain or go out of your way to avoid and suppress pain triggers. Effectively, you override your body's natural fight or flight process of facing fear, complicating an action to deal with it and releasing the tension. Chronic pain results from a chronic inability to access the parasympathetic relaxation response.
Developing a sense of body position and orientation within yourself can help you calm your activated nervous system and recognize the ways you are contributing to your pain. Your therapist can help draw attention to how changes in your stance, gaze, facial expression, muscle tension, breath, and more are responses to pain that habitually foster more discomfort. Practicing mindful awareness of your body, pain, and your responses allow for clarity and consciousness. This opens the door to movement and feelings that can finally complete, fear-based actions in your body, help you understand why you feel so bad and choose different bodily behavior.
3. Somatic therapy for chronic pain:
Locate and discharge the origins of pain and tension
You may or may not know what caused your chronic pain initially. All your body knows is that a chronic state of high arousal exists. Thus you may experience poor respiration, digestion, blood pressure, and bodily control as well as more pain. Somatic therapy can help you (without revisiting a past trauma) increase your ability to regulate and resolve pain with movement.
Via sensory exploration, breathing techniques, and gentle natural movements, somatic therapy works directly with the nervous system. The goal? To gradually help discharge the unprocessed survival energy that keeps you tense and hurting.
Ideally, you and your therapist will get you back into your body by facing the fear or resistance to movement that is limiting your life. Conscious breathing, stretching or gently shaking your limbs, and practicing yoga can help soothe you and engage your parasympathetic nervous system. Such deep relaxation reflects a return to more bodily control, optimal functioning, and clarity that can help you reclaim your peace of mind.
Move forward, relieved and more relaxed
Finally, trust that significant alleviation of chronic pain is possible over time. Combined with somatic therapy you need to treat your body well. Nutrition, sleep, appropriate medicine, and community connection are all part of supporting your body-mind connection going forward.
Through your work, you and your therapist will be getting you back into your body by creating fresh neural pathways. Known as neuroplasticity, you are literally altering the wiring of your brain for a more beneficial connection with your body. By getting away from words and avoidance you can take a guided trip shifting toward a deep understanding of your internal pain experience and your body's ability to heal itself. You aren’t left in pain but led toward a deeper appreciation for your body's power and innate harmony.
Are you ready for relief and a higher level of self-knowledge and attunement? The resulting revelations and insight might make the journey through pain to this point worth it. Still, let's ease your suffering and go gently forward. I am here for you.
If you are, considering somatic therapy, please contact me for a free consultation.
Learn more about somatic therapy.
April Lyons, MA, LPC is a somatic psychotherapist and currently owns a private practice group in Boulder CO. She specializes in PTSD, eating disorders, and bipolar disorder treatment. April is trained in EMDR Therapy, Trauma-Informed Care, and is certified as an Eating Disorder Intuitive Therapist.
