Releasing our past traumatic memories ends the cycle of numbing with addiction our negative, shame-inducing thoughts.
Chronic tension patterns lead to addictive coping strategies.
Sometimes 12-step recovery programs are not enough. We may achieve sobriety, but we are not in recovery until we communicate with the underlying trauma from a place of acceptance and understanding. In somatic oriented recovery, underlying material is met in a new way. Working with mindfulness, somatic sensing and resource building, I create a safe, reflective, therapeutic environment for clients to develop kindness toward their internal experience. Increasing self-regulation and impulse control in this way, allows for more direct, satisfying ways to get your needs met. With caring support we can learn ways to renegotiate early overwhelming relationships at the core of dissociation and trauma. Learning to tolerate sensations, emotions, aches and changes in the body brings us deeper into contact with ourselves, allowing for more choice, more ways to manage stress, more patience and the spaciousness to discern healthier ways to meet our needs.
Without access to the body’s full spectrum of experience, life is strewn with stress, frustration or dissatisfaction. We may turn to temporary conveniences which leave us feeling more depleted, dependent and separate. There is a hole in the cup we keep trying to fill up: an unaddressed memory of traumatic stress embedded in the tissues of the body.
Even a slight somatic awareness of this underlying trauma can stop the cycle of shame and anxiety, and slow the reactive impulses that create addiction. Addiction treatment in traditional psychotherapy often undervalues the importance of orientation to the present moment. Healing addiction with somatic experiencing therapy resolves the repetitive flooding of past traumatic stress, as well as builds up awareness resources to the sobering calmness in the present moment.
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