Somatic Therapy Quotes

“All emotions, even those that are suppressed and unexpressed, have physical effects. Unexpressed emotions tend to stay in the body like small ticking time bombs—they are illnesses in incubation.”
― Marilyn Van M. Derbur, Miss America By Day: Lessons Learned From Ultimate Betrayals And Unconditional Love

“Every thought, feeling, and sensation within your body throughout the day offer you an opportunity to love. Good or bad, whatever you experience is a lesson or a reminder to connect with love.”
― Aletheia Luna, Awakened Empath: The Ultimate Guide to Emotional, Psychological and Spiritual Healing

“The redirection of orientation and attention can be as simple as asking clients to become aware of a "good" or "safe" feeling in the body instead of focusing on their physical pain or elevated heart rate. Or the therapist can ask clients to experiment with focusing attention away from the traumatic activation in their body and toward thoughts or images related to their positive experiences and competencies, such as success in their job. This shift is often difficult for clients who have habituated to feeling pulled back repetitively into the most negative somatic reminders of their traumatic experiences. However, if the therapist guides them to practice deeply immersing themselves in a positive somatic experience (i.e., noting the changes in posture, breath, and muscular tone that emerge as they remember their competence), clients will gain the ability to reorient toward their competencies.
They experience their ability to choose to what they pay attention and discover that it really is possible to resist the somatic claims of the past.”
― Pat Ogden, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy

“Embodied self-awareness is the ability to pay attention to ourselves, to feel our sensations, emotions, and movements online, in the present moment, without the mediating influence of judgmental thoughts.”
― Allen Fogel

“Only when tensions or pain in the body arise do we pay attention to what is happening.”
― Manuela Mischke-Reeds, Somatic Psychotherapy Toolbox: 125 Worksheets and Exercises for Trauma & Stress

“There is a soul weariness that comes with caring. From daily doing business with the handiwork of fear. Sometimes it lives at the edges of one's life, brushing against hope and barely making its presence known. At other times, it comes crashing in, overtaking one with its vivid images of another's terror with its profound demands for attention; nightmares, strange fears, and generalized hopelessness.”
― Beth Hudnall Stamm

“Tracking is noticing all the little things that go on while someone is talking, especially the things that aren't being talked about. It is knowing how to read these as clue's to the speaker's present experience and meanings. . . The therapist has this two-fold task: to be in the world of the client, in all the usual ways, and at the same time, to be outside that world, able to see it from a wider perspective.”
― Ron Kurtz

“There is energy in me that needs to move. How do I want to move it now?”
― Dr. Scott Lyons