What Is Somatic Touch Therapy And How Can It Help?

Somatic Touch Therapy is uniquely designed to touch based intervention modality to help the body recover from physical and emotional overwhelm, which can also be called traumatic experiences, ranging from the earliest of experiences to current ongoing chronic pain. It is by nature a body oriented touch modality that works with creating new pathways in our neurophysiology to reset towards safety, relaxation and healthier functioning.

It is a gentle and slow type of somatic bodywork that provides critical neuro signals to the body to decrease the production of stress cortisol levels and increase the trust hormones such as oxytocin so we are able to start to organize towards having more and more regulation and resilience in our whole body including the nervous system and vital organs (viscera).

Extremely stressful experiences can deeply impact our whole being from the regulation of our nervous system, vital organs, immune functioning, body structural as well as our core emotional sense of safety and trust in the world. If these experiences are not worked out, they will remain in our bodies whether we remember them or not.

Kathy Kain, a leading somatic therapy trainer in the field shares: “Resiliency and self-regulation are primary elements that contribute to recovery from traumatic stress.” I support Kathy Kain in Los Angeles to deliver trainings for other professional therapists in the field. After years of doing this work, I see that somatic touch work is key to relieving chronic stress held in our body. So it can really help folks with chronic health issues, medical traumas, as well as deep emotional losses that elude even many health professionals.

Somatic touch therapy support is especially important for those that have experienced a lot of stressful experiences at an early age which others might also identify as developmental trauma. For many people, this may not even be in our memory of what happened or why we feel not helped despite all the therapy work that they do…they just know that talk therapy alone is just helping them to manage but not really completely resolving their core wounds. According to Stephen Terrell, a leading attachment and somatic touch trainer/therapist who I also assisted in organizing somatic trainings shares: “Using touch we can have direct access to the physiology of developmental trauma, character style and attachment, and can move far beyond the limitations of verbal exploration.”

How can we really heal, at a core level, if the first language, touch, is absent in therapeutic work? And it is for this reason Kathy Kain emphasizes that: “Somatic therapists need to be highly skilled in their capacities to understand as many of the body’s forms of communication as possible.”

The key elements of somatic touch support are having the right kind of attuned and embodied touch. What I mean by “attunement” is a deep nonverbal body listening and appropriately responding to what the person and body actually needs; not what we imagine is needed. And what I mean by “embodied touch” is using all my years of experience on a touch level to tap into what is happening in my client’s body through my body and especially coming into my hands. I am listening carefully to not only what they are saying but what they are not saying, how they say it, what their bodies do when we work together, what pace and style needs to be adjusted so they can feel safe to allow the body to reorganize and reset.

This type of touch is vastly different than traditional bodywork and can be profoundly useful for resetting deep stress holding patterns.

In all my years of providing traditional massage, mental health counseling and other healing modalities, I can tell you with certainty this work is much more integrated and holistic in nature with far reaching positive impacts into changing a person’s stress physiology. Most of my clients have come to me after years of getting various services with some or a lot of frustration about how hard it is to feel better. Then when we start to do touch work to help the regulation of the kidney/adrenals, diaphragm, gut and brain stem the results they experience are beyond anything else they have done before in a traditional sense. It is like a whole new world opens up to them. Most feel met in ways that are hard to describe and yet instinctively they know this is a new way forward towards their overall health. I wish everyone could have that experience: its amazing!