Somatic Therapy Saved My Life

When burnout became my life, even therapy couldn’t reach me. Somatic work didn’t fix me — it helped me love what was already there.

Over the last decade or so, I’ve burned out and hit walls many times. During those periods life felt meaningless, ineffective, and joyless. I felt so trapped that I dreamed of quitting my job and becoming a trad wife or working at Starbucks. Anything would be easier than this. Finally, these burnouts began compounding and stretching, until they just became life. In this small, deadening existence, I landed in places that scared me: I stopped caring about the children I worked with, my relationship felt doomed, I couldn't cry, couldn’t feel, felt too much, didn’t really want to live. 

How had it gotten so bad? I had done things “right”, hadn’t I? I had gone to college, gotten my masters degree, started working in a helping profession. I had been in therapy for years, including brainspotting and EMDR. I knew the traps I could fall into--overthinking, underfeeling, seeing things as black or white, shame--and where they came from. So what was the problem? 

The problem was this: I still couldn’t feel in my bones that I was good and that I was safe. I still didn’t like myself much less love myself. But if someone had asked me I would have said that I did like myself, and would have had lots of theoretical frameworks to back it up. I got really good at managing the optics of healing. I could talk about trauma and nervous system regulation and attachment theory like it was my second language. And still, I felt like I was dying inside. Sometimes I think I was chasing a version of healing that would never ask me to change in the way that mattered most. I wanted to stay safe, but be transformed. I wanted to stay hidden, but be known. I wanted to be held, but not cracked open.

I spent time and energy bitching about people I didn’t like (using fancy therapy language, of course) and feeling like a victim. I was still pretending to be okay when I wasn’t, with a host of psychosomatic symptoms to show for it--anxiety, depression, nausea, heartburn, acne. Every interaction where I pushed down a real feeling was a debt I had to pay later, only I could never pay. I wanted to hide. I couldn’t stand being in public where I was sure I had to pretend confidence and okayness. 

I knew that I needed something different, but I had no idea what. Therapy, bodywork, reiki, books, podcasts, workshops, psychedelics, vacations, journaling…Isn’t this what it looks like to go “all in” on healing? What do we do when therapy isn't enough? The truth is I would have rather done anything else than take the step I needed to take. It seemed like the stupidest, simplest thing, and completely unattainable. I am of course talking about the adventure and risk of self love. 

The container I chose was 8 months of somatic group work. I thought the hard part would be the big cathartic moments like screaming, crying, and pounding the floor in front of 10 strangers to Radiohead's “Creep”. That was hard but also fun. The harder parts were the mundane moments of practice. Expressing little things that bothered me that I was used to intellectualizing or “deciding” not to feel, only to feel intense resentment later on. Taking a shower with a million candles blazing and listening to Enya as a way to wash away the day's emails. I thought I knew what it meant when people said “feel your feelings” but sweetie, no I did not. Through somatics I started to see emotions as maps instead of problems I needed to fix with the right blend of weed, adderall, ativan and wine.

The hardest thing of all though, was viscerally feeling the hold shame still had on my life, and my tendency to convert that shame into controlling others. Teehee! As I started to see beautiful changes in my life, I began resenting my partner for not doing his own somatic work, and pushed him to follow my lead. The evangelical urge was strong and my partner saw through my “concern” for him in about .000024 seconds. Evangelizing is a shame based behavior that takes us out of love and into blaming the other person for their pain. How dare you suffer in front of me when I’m giving you The Answer? Just think of how amazing our life would be if we were both as healed as I am! So as excited as I am about healing through somatic work, I’m not interested in pushing it on anyone else, despite the dramatic title of this post. My teacher Stacy says that self intimacy comes from a deep willingness to be with what’s inside. That kind of intimacy felt impossible at first. Sometimes it still does. But I’m starting to trust the truth of it as my life has continued to transform. The anxiety is gone. The depression is gone. The love I feel for myself is a small plant that I water each day, sometimes with tears.