Somatic Health offers a complement to the more cognitive-based addiction therapies with their emphasis on reprogramming thinking. That approach has its merits, but ignoring or sidelining the body can fall short of uncovering the healing that the body is trying to move towards.
It’s all about connection – not just removing the drugs, but recovering a spontaneous, natural and wider connection with self and environment.
Research and anecdotal evidence has shown that people in the grip of chronic addiction have often experienced serious trauma in their lives. So we start by stabilising – connecting with places inside or around us that feel stable, enlivened and secure. Through a somatic approach we can meet trauma safely, steadily and within a grounded field of wider experience in our actual felt body which includes both pleasant and neutral sensations.
We know that people use drugs to deal with uncomfortable and painful feelings. Somatic Health offers a simple way to stay with challenging feelings which steadily increases our tolerance for discomfort. As one of the workshop participants commented:
“This is a way of looking at stuff without being overwhelmed by it.”
When we connect with our somatic felt sense we are withdrawing attention from the stories and scenarios that can tend to dominate. We pause, we meet our fear as sensation, we get close to it, and we are then no longer controlled by it. We see it, we feel it, and we are still alive; the fear has lost its power over us. We recognise that we are bigger, that we are more than the fear. In this way some people find that somatic practice gives more relief than the drug itself, and the drug can become increasingly redundant.
“Through this somatic body awareness I am having more fun without drugs. This is no longer a discipline its a preferred choice”.
Somatic Health addiction recovery pilot course
A successful trial programme of Somatic Health, offered through the national drug and alcohol support service Emerging Futures, demonstrated the immense benefits of this approach in the field of trauma and addiction.
After starting the sessions people reported feeling safe, relaxed and content. Some were in less physical and emotional pain. Many reported improved quality of sleep, while others commented on having an increased openness and willingness to change. Participants were getting on better with their family and friends; they found it easier to talk about their feelings and the reasons behind those feelings.
This led to a life-enhancing feedback-loop whereby participants were increasingly motivated to become aware of bodily sensations in their day-to-day experiences outside of the sessions. This brought self-knowledge and self-trust, and it helped people take positive action to feel better.
At the beginning and at the end of this eight-week programme participants were invited to fill in the ‘Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness’ (MAIA) survey. The results indicated that people coming through this programme had developed their awareness of the connection between body sensations and emotional states and that their capacity to be with sensations of pain or discomfort had increased, as had their ability to sustain and control attention to body sensations. They were better able to regulate distress, to actively listen to the body for insight, and to experience their body as safe and trustworthy.
