Somatic Experiencing and Holistic Healing

Your Body Answers Before You’ve Decided Anything

A tingling turns up the moment a decision is in front of you, and it has an opinion whether or not you asked.

You find the exits on your way into a building without deciding to look for them, and an unfamiliar room is harder to enjoy than you’d admit to anybody.

The place you sleep is safe, you know that in the ordinary way you know things, and something in you insists you stay alert anyway, so falling asleep takes what it takes.

Your Head and Your Body Have Become Strangers

Somewhere along the way, the two of them stopped speaking, two separate entities surviving inside one being.

So every conversation you’ve had about this has happened on one side of that divide, in words, with half of you fluent in them.

The half that tingles, scans, and stays awake has never once been asked.

Naming What Your Body Is Doing Is Only Where We Start

Somatic Experiencing, which we’re both trained in, means working with what your body is doing, the bracing, the shutting down, the wired and tired, rather than only what your mind says about it.

The work runs in an order, and the order is the point: first, we name it while it’s happening, out loud, in ordinary words.

The second is to explain what it means, because the tingle, the scanning, and the gestures you don’t know you’re making all point back at something protective, the fighting or fleeing or going still or making peace that never got to finish, because you had somewhere else to be.

Then we do something about it in your body, with us there: staying with a sensation until it shifts, letting a held gesture finish itself, your breath used deliberately because it’s the one part of that system you can reach on purpose.

Some Therapy Comes at You Too Fast to Be of Any Use

If you’ve tried something like this and left a session in worse shape than you arrived in, the pace is the likeliest explanation.

Anything arriving faster than you can take it in has the same shape as the thing it was meant to help with, and your system reads shape long before intent.

So we go low and slow, in pieces small enough that your system finishes one before the next begins, which is a seed’s arrangement rather than a schedule: the breaking open happens underground, before anything shows.

Your Head and Your Body Start Comparing Notes

Clients describe feeling less fragmented, their body and mind working as complementary parts of one person.

A decision turns up, the tingling comes with it, and it stops getting the deciding vote.

And falling asleep stops requiring you to talk down the part of you that stayed on watch.

Nothing Has to Be Visible for You to Begin

A sensation you can’t yet account for is enough to start a free consultation with.

It’s virtual work, anywhere in Texas, and Alana can be reached at amccraw@plantedtobloomcounseling.org.

You’d be starting something that stays underground a while before it shows, and we’d be down there with you the whole time.

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