05/09/2026
Some somatic therapies “target people with capital-‘T’ Trauma; others claim to be for just about anyone”—the question is whether they can really help the frazzled masses, Faith Hill reports. https://theatln.tc/r4e0aXFr
Traditional talk therapy can often be seen as a top-down approach: Patients identify problems in their thinking, habits, or life as they hope to work through them. Somatic therapy, in contrast, works from the bottom up, Hill explains. The therapist Sybil Ottenstein told Hill that she typically starts her sessions by asking clients to slow down and pay attention to corporeal sensations: “What does it feel like in your chest? In your throat?” As they talk, she encourages them to stay in their body, to let themselves feel whatever is coming up. People cry. They yawn. They scream. They stretch. They dance.
The word “somatic” is nothing new, but “recently, it’s been popping up everywhere, appended to a variety of practices that involve tuning in to physical symptoms in order to ameliorate psychological ones,” Hill writes. Somatic therapists like Ottenstein have noticed a significant bump in interest; one of the major somatic-therapy training programs reported that its applicants more than doubled from 2020 to 2023.
“Somatics—the whole roomy umbrella of practices—might seem like an odd fit for the information age, when people are more accustomed to finding answers on the internet than within themselves. But that could be precisely the draw for thinkers and analyzers who are tired of ruminating in anxious circles, who spend their days in front of a laptop and nights scrolling an iPhone,” Hill argues. “For millennia, people have yearned to break out of the confines of their bodies; they’ve searched—through religion, spirituality, drugs—for transcendence. Now, for some, the existential quest is inverted: Instead of seeking to escape their prison of flesh and bones, they want to reinhabit it.”
Read more at the link.
🎨: Oyow
