Want to Fix Your Mind? Let Your Body Talk.
By Daniel Bergner for The New York Times
Somatic therapy is surging, with the promise that true healing may reside in focusing on the physical rather than the mental.
In therapy, whether we’re troubled by low-grade suffering or besieged by forces more powerful and unrelenting, we tend to expect that talking our way toward insight will lead us to become at least somewhat better, less burdened, even happier beings. The mind is the way in and the way out. But a core S.E. (somatic experiencing) principle is that, though we may assume otherwise, we live “from the bottom up,” as S.E. practitioners say, and the content of emotional states ranging from common anxiety and depression to the onslaught of full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder arrives in our brains from the neural circuitry running throughout our bodies. S.E. upends beliefs about the mind as the origin and essential locus of our feelings.
Read the full article here.