Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy is a unique and holistic approach to addressing trauma, stress, anxiety, depression, harmful relationship patterns, disordered eating, self-esteem, and other mental health conditions and challenges. This approach combines evidence-based treatments incorporating the body and nervous system with traditional talk therapy. Sessions can be highly or loosely structured, depending on your preferences. Though each mother’s treatment is unique, common interventions include:
Mapping Your Nervous System
(Polyvagal Theory)
Working With Parts
(Internal Family Systems/Ego State Therapy)
Incorporating the Body in Talk Therapy
(Sensorimotor Psychotherapy)
Befriending Your Nervous System with Polyvagal Therapy
Our nervous system’s primary function is to keep us safe. Under ideal circumstances, our systems develop a flexible ebb and flow, giving us the ability to sense potential threats, respond appropriately, and return relatively quickly to a state of calm connection. When we experience trauma or chronic stress, our nervous systems can become more comfortable in places of fear and disconnection. This causes us to move quickly and intensely to anger, anxiety, withdrawal, avoidance, and shutdown, and struggle to find our way back home. Polyvagal Theory suggests that our biological wiring largely predicts how we interpret, experience, and respond to our environment. It theorizes that all humans have three primary states of nervous system functioning: Safety and Connection, Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn, and Immobilization and Shutdown. The stories we tell ourselves, the emotions we feel, and how we respond depend on the state of our system. Befriending and mapping our unique system helps us recognize which state we are in, how to support ourselves in that state, and how to move quickly back to a place where we feel safe, grounded, and connected.
Working With Parts: Internal Family Systems Therapy
Do you experience intense emotions or thoughts that you wish you could respond to differently? Would you like to experience these states less frequently or intensely? Do you have patterns of relating to others that you wish you could change? Do you find yourself in similar situations, environments, or relationships repeatedly that are not in your best interest? Patterns are difficult to break, even when we desperately want to change. Patterns of feeling, thinking, relating, and behaving that occur together are called parts or ego states. Parts are different versions of you that manifest under specific circumstances or in response to certain triggers. Recall a fight you had with a partner, friend, or family member where you looked back at your behavior and thought “That wasn’t me.” This is an example of a part at work.
Different parts have different roles, some of which are helpful, productive, and necessary. We have parts that we lean on during life challenges, stressful work meetings, or uncomfortable discussions with our children. We also have parts that prevent us from feeling distressing emotions and activate when we feel threatened, ashamed, abandoned, or sad. In Internal Family Systems Therapy, these are called Protective Parts because they try to keep us safe. Ironically, our protective parts are often what drive us to seek therapy. These parts fall into two categories: Managers and Firefighters.
Managers try to prevent harm through various means of control and often run much of our daily lives. Common examples of managers are:
- Perfectionism
- Criticism
- Over-working
- Caretaking
- Being passive or submissive
- Expecting the worst
- Over-planning or over-scheduling
- Self-sacrificing
- Self-criticism or blame
Firefighters are more reactive and extreme. They appear when intense emotions, such as sadness, shame, anger, fear, and loneliness arise. Their goal is to distract, avoid, or numb the emotional fire, by any means necessary. Common firefighters include:
- Substance misuse
- Shopping or overspending
- Gambling
- Binge-watching
- Video game addiction
- Pornography addiction
- Rage
- Dissociation
- Self-harm
- Disordered eating
- High-risk behaviors
- Excessive social media use
- Suicidal thoughts and behaviors
Parts that develop under stressful or traumatic circumstances can cause us to experience emotional pain such as loneliness, neediness, grief, fear, shame, feelings of worthlessness, dependency, and abandonment. These are called exiles because we often carry them in our unconscious. These parts are often associated with traumatic events and distressing memories or emotions. Our protective parts work hard to minimize how much of this pain we feel but with consequences to our health, happiness, and relationships.
The part of us that can hold and work with all our parts is the Self. This is who we are when our protective parts are at rest. In this state, we are naturally and effortlessly curious, calm, clear, compassionate, connected, confident, creative, and courageous. In therapy, we work with the Self to soothe, nurture, and understand our protective parts, rather than fight against them. This allows us to be with our parts without being consumed by them. In this way, we can improve our capacities for emotion regulation, flexible thinking, and repair of relationships.
Incorporating the Body in Talk Therapy (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy)
Trauma, chronic stress, and attachment injuries often create feelings of profound disconnection. We may feel disconnected from our families, environment, or bodies. We may feel like we are watching our lives on a screen or running on autopilot, without fully participating or being present. As mothers, feeling disconnected or unable to access joy with our children can lead to guilt or trigger past feelings of shame or worthlessness. This creates a cycle of disconnection, shame, and further disconnection that is difficult to break.
While traditional talk therapy focuses on the relationship between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy includes the body and nervous system in our chain of experience. Stress, anxiety, depression, and trauma create patterns of movement, posture, and sensation that the body remembers. By incorporating bodily awareness with traditional talk therapy, we can learn how the body influences your experience and how to break patterns of distressing symptoms.
Mental Health Counseling:
Traditional talk therapy is a flexible and collaborative approach to managing mental health challenges, improving relationships, solving problems, navigating life transitions, deepening self-understanding or acceptance, or improving self-esteem. A dedicated, safe space and time to focus on ourselves and our needs is an invaluable resource for navigating the joys and challenges of motherhood. Therapy offers a space to explore, ask questions, process emotions and experiences, cry, grieve, and increase self-awareness.
Coaching:
Coaching is an alternative to therapy for mothers outside of Massachusetts or those who prefer a direct, focused approach to managing their mental health. Coaching is an option for clients interested in direct advice and guidance about lifestyle changes that would benefit their specific circumstances, tools for symptom management, or creating a plan for the overall management of their mental health needs.
Integrative Somatic Trauma Coaching:
Mothers outside of Massachusetts interested in Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy can consider coaching as an alternative. Coaching clients benefit from similar interventions as therapy clients but with a greater emphasis on skills and education, and without processing traumatic events. Coaching can also be used as a supplement to talk therapy.