Healing childhood trauma with somatic therapy
Are you looking to heal the very old wounds created in childhood? Maybe you’ve tried to heal them with prior therapists by talking about your pain, learning about these old wounds, yet without any symptom alleviation. Or maybe you’ve tried to redirect your feelings, through medication and/or telling yourself to focus on positive feelings and mantras. Regardless of which method you’ve tried to feel better, something isn’t quite working, and you are still feeling depressed, anxious or stuck with PTSD symptoms.
At Brooklyn Somatic Therapy, we specialize in healing childhood trauma. We do this because many of our therapists are trained in a somatic and mindfulness-based modality that specializes in healing childhood trauma and the maladaptive beliefs that form out of trauma. With this expertise, we focus on unpacking all of the beliefs that the child formed to try to make sense of their world.
For instance, maladaptive beliefs include:
I am not good enough
There is something wrong with me
I am bad
I am unworthy of love
I am too much/my needs are too much
It is my fault when bad things happen
Some of these beliefs are buried so deeply in our unconscious that we don’t even know they are there until we do deeper therapeutic work. Sometimes we know these beliefs are there but we have no idea how to get rid of them.
Either way, Brooklyn Somatic Therapy has the expertise you need to tackle these feelings and old beliefs head on, and help you to finally heal.
We work in a very deep, regressive child state, helping you to access the childhood trauma in an embodied way, living through the mind, body and heart of that younger version of you to understand the language, belief system and repressed feelings of the child. Once there, we offer the child the missing information they needed to make sense of their world.
Missing information might sound like:
Mom’s anger had nothing to do with you. She needed help, and it wasn’t ok that she screamed at you like that and said those things.
There is nothing wrong with you. You were just a sweet, normal child.
Your parents got divorced because they were fighting a lot. But they both really loved you, and their divorce was not your fault.
In regular conscious awareness, these kinds of statements can sound silly. Clients will say,
“Yeah I know that…” But once we access a more regressed child state, when the child part
hears these statements, there are often surprising and intense emotional releases. Often clients will express how shocked they are that they are sobbing at the information, because their adult brain knows this.
The wisdom of child state work is that it heals the part of us that was traumatized, the part that is still frozen in time, by helping that part integrate into adult wisdom, and a more sophisticated way of understanding the world, ourselves and human relationships.