Why you should work with a somatic therapist if you are interested in EMDR
How somatic therapists in NYC are uniquely trained to use EMDR to help clients process trauma
4 min read
Reprocessing trauma requires bringing the whole traumatic memory back online – including not just negative beliefs about yourself, but also the sensations and feelings in the body associated with the event. That’s why working with a somatic therapist may better help you reprocess a traumatic memory.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in delving beyond what happened to you and want to minimize the emotional charge related to the traumatic experience you’re coming to therapy for. So, although you may have a story about the event, you might either be disconnected from the feeling to that story or find yourself looping in a cycle of the emotion without ever reaching clarity and resolve. While EMDR can’t change our past, it can give us the tools needed to process the feelings fully and have new insights and more distance from the original response that keeps us feeling stuck.
Yet, cognitive talk therapy is the default approach for most therapists because it’s both widely taught in graduate programs and most broadly accepted by insurance panels and in research studies. Cognitive or talk therapy around a traumatic event might look like working with a client on identifying a coherent narrative from start to finish. While this is a valuable component of healing, retelling a traumatic event can either be retriggering or incomplete, for far as it fails to alleviate distressing symptoms. In other words, every time I think about that event I’m still overcome with tears. Sarah Shuster, a therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy says, “I often hear a similar refrain from new clients who have already done extensive therapy work – they’ve reached a limit of understanding while continuing to suffer and feeling stuck, even worse, apathetic about therapy’s ability to provide lasting healing.”
“Somatic therapists are uniquely trained in helping clients to stay with, deepen, and transform feelings.”
By contrast, somatic approaches often entail increased post-graduate training and are still working their way into the mainstream. Somatic therapists are uniquely trained in helping clients to stay with, deepen, and transform feelings. They spend more time helping their clients drop down from intellectualizing, in order to notice their bodily sensations and feelings. So, if a client is already working with a somatic therapist, noticing what’s happening for them in an EMDR session can feel less overwhelming.
EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, is a process that helps clients focus on the sensations and emotions they experienced while connecting to a memory and using bilateral stimulation, like tapping on their body. (Blum, D., The New York Times) Somatic therapy is more attuned to connecting bodily sensation to emotions, while simultaneously distinguishing a bodily sensation (i.e. flutter in the belly or tightness in the jaw) from a feeling, like anxiety or anger.
Somatic therapists are more likely to establish the kind of resourcing tools that show up in EMDR, like helping a client to establish grounding tools when emotions become overwhelming.
One of the most important markers around EMDR’s success is a clinician’s capacity to allow clients to hold their core emotion (sadness, guilt, anger, etc.) all the way through, without interruption. This is a subtle but crucially important skill that somatic therapists utilize in their day-to-day work with clients. When clients feel their grief all the way through during an EMDR session, they often experience spontaneous insights that allow them to see the situation from a more distanced point of view.
While clients are going through the EMDR session fairly independently, therapists’ efficacy in guiding clients is also dependent on their capacity to monitor their own emotional stasis throughout sessions. In other words, Somatic therapists are trained not only in tracking a client’s moment-to-moment feelings and bodily sensations, but also in managing what’s happening for themselves as the therapist. This skill helps therapists readily identify when clients may be stuck and get clients back on track, as needed.
“Somatic therapists are trained to hold a client's emotion without interruption – essential for EMDR’s success.”
A core component of an EMDR processing session is taking the kind of “leap of faith” that requires a therapist to let go of controlling a session (i.e. stop talking) or abstain from the very kind of interpretation work that many therapists are initially trained in. As Laurel Parnell shares in her seminal writing on the topic, A Therapist’s Guide to EMDR, it is essential for EMDR that therapists stay out of the way and trust the process. Working with a somatic therapist trained in monitoring their own anxiety and discomfort as a client faces traumatic memories helps ensure that EMDR works are instrumental in EMDR’s success.