People often misunderstand somatic approaches to therapy, thinking it’s one of two extremes: either it’s all cathartic physical and emotional expression, “just shake and scream it out” or it’s all nervous system regulation, a bag of physical tricks to calm down.
It’s neither of these things.
What we do in body psychotherapy is use physical sensations, movement impulses, etc. to access parts of our experience that escape our conscious awareness but influence our lives. We give those responses an environment where they can express and then reorganize, having come to know and feel the things we didn’t before.
If we immediately regulate every surge in emotional activation, we are stuck in managing an experience vs metabolizing an experience. You can be too regulated to grow. If we use awareness of the body to ramp up chaotic emotional reactions and fling ourselves into catharsis, we also rarely end up processing anything. It was still too intense and too fast to change.
Somatic psychotherapy is about maintaining a working distance from our unhelpful reactions; not too close or overwhelming, not too far or out of touch. This “just right” amount of contact lets something new happen. Some part of the experience that’s usually not allowed to talk to another part suddenly gets to (because we’re not rushing to regulate it away or cathartically throw it out of us), and that new contact transforms how we feel and respond to the things we seek therapy for.