The Body Remembers

Your mind might feel you're over it, but are you truly, when your body is keeping score? Here’s how somatic therapy can help

- KONIKA DATTA

Our emotions are said to be energy in motion, and energy is meant to move. Suppressing or ignoring overwhelming feelings leads to trapping our emotional wounds within the body, which later manifest physically. Something similar happened to Divya, one of the many clients of Sophia Ali, a psychotherapist and somatic movement educator. When she was introduced to the concept of somatic therapy by her cousin, Divya had been to several therapists, but nothing seemed to help her chronic backache, shoulder pain, headaches, and dizziness in between working hours.

The purpose of somatic therapy is to release the stored stress, tension, and trauma from the body in a healthy and safe manner via somatic exercises like dance movement therapy, drama therapy, or art therapy, amongst others. While tracing the root cause of Divya's bodily pains during the initial sessions, Sophia discovered that Divya has a history of unresolved childhood trauma. "It's not like I asked her this verbally. Often, her past experience would come up when we would do breathing exercises," Sophia says, further adding that during one of those days, Divya told her, 'I was standing outside my classroom as a punishment once, and I felt that today when I was breathing.' Such is the capacity of somatic therapy, Sophia says. As her client started getting better, their sessions gradually faded from twice a week to once a week, to now only need-based therapy.

In the 2004 book The Body Keeps The Score, trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk explains that trauma leaves an imprint on our mind, body, and soul. Thus, you won't be able to heal the mind without first addressing the emotions held in the body.

Intimately Intertwined