What is Sensorimotor Psychotherapy?

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Bessel van der Kolk, an American psychiatrist with over 30 years’ experience of working with people who have experienced trauma, has written a book entitled  “The Body Keeps the Score”.  And that really is the truth of it – our bodies hold a record of what has happened to us and we carry that body stored memory with us even if we do not know or understand it.

For every experience in life we make two types of memory -  memory stored in our brain and memory stored in our body. When we are traumatised by an event – no matter how big or how apparently insignificant - the body stores a memory of that event. This memory can be reactivated later in life by a subconscious trigger, such as a sound or smell, that encourages the body to actually relive the trauma memory, even as we appear to go on with our everyday lives. Often we are not consciously aware we are remembering but we can feel anxious, frightened, depressed or confused for no obvious reason.

This is where Sensorimotor Psychotherapy can help, as together we begin to notice these reactions in the body and bring them to conscious awareness.  As we bring these reactions into our conscious awareness, they help us find the reasons for our anxiety, depression or confusion and this allows us to access the deep meanings and emotions that arise from the trauma, and then we can gently process these. This helps us then remember the trauma without the traumatic effect in our body. We do not erase the memory, but as we then bring it to mind it will have less effect on us. Our nervous system will calm down as it no longer needs to be in such a heightened state of alertness. We no longer seem to be continually reliving the traumatic moment, but we can be free to enjoy whatever experience we are having now. 

Often people will have experienced many traumatic events. The joy of the sensorimotor technique is that each event does not need to be remembered to be healed, and even events that occur before we develop our communication skills can be accessed through observing what happens in the body and working with it.  For many of us, when trauma occurs, our emotional development gets stopped at the stage of the trauma, so as we heal we begin to become emotionally strong and develop new capacity to enjoy life.

Curiosity about what is happening within us will go a long way to helping us heal – together we will explore what is already there and see how, as we look at ourselves with loving kindness, we will begin to heal.
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What happens in a typical counselling session?

• Each counselling session will last approximately 55 minutes
• At the first session we will create a counselling contract, which outlines the responsibilities of the Counsellor towards the Client, and also the Client's responsibilities in the counselling relationship.
• Before we begin to work with any traumatic memories we will develop coping strategies to help you deal with the difficult experiences.
• As you share your story I may notice a body movement that occurs as you are speaking about a particular experience, and we will then focus on this area of the story and the reaction that occurs as you speak about it.  We will mindfully explore this and follow whatever else comes to our attention.  This may bring to mind a particular memory, mental picture, thought or feeling.
• ​As we bring our focus to these, we will go deeper into the experience and come to understand the meanings you have made about yourself, which may uncover a range of emotions.  As we process these emotions you will come to a new experience and belief about yourself – we will celebrate that and savour it so that this new experience is what you will hold on to.
• It may be that we don't get right through to a new experience in a single session, but at our next session we can pick up from where we left off.
• The aim of all Sensorimotor therapy is to be gentle and to bring us back to completeness – mind, body and spirit wholeness. ​​​

This is an exciting time in trauma counselling. There is so much new science that can help inform our therapy, for example the Polyvagal Theory developed by Stephen Porges. The use of functional MRIs has helped science see and understand what is happening within our brains and how this differs from normal if we have suffered traumatic experiences. Much of this new information also points back to ancient wisdom held by different indigenous groups, who use traditional methods of healing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy combines the ancient with the new.

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Mindfulness

What is it?

Mindfulness has become the “in thing” in counselling and psychotherapy. It was not widely known about outside of the Buddhist tradition until the 1980s when Jon Kabat-Zin developed a mindfulness based stress reduction course, but now many people recommend mindfulness. Being mindful allows us to direct our attention inwards and begin to notice more of the things that are happening beneath our usual conscious awareness. 

It is now known that what we pay attention to, we reinforce. Mindfulness helps us become aware of what we are paying attention to, and allows us to make choices that can help us change. In Sensorimotor Psychotherapy we explore the things that we are usually not aware of, and then intentionally choose to pay attention to different things, and reinforce these new things in our lives. In brain science we now know about neuroplasticity  - the ability of the brain to change in response to new experiences.  The adage that “what fires together wires together “ helps us to see how this happens. As we repeat new experiences these become more likely to occur and our older, and perhaps more damaging, patterns of behaviour are less likely to happen. As we practise new ways of acting and thinking, changes in our lives develop.

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