How I became a Somatic therapist
My path to somatics wasn’t a one way street. And it certainly wasn’t a conventional one. It was more like the “path less traveled” (something we talk about in somatic therapy a lot given it’s a useful metaphor for neural pathways). No roadmap, no tour-guide, not even a destination. It felt more like instinct or intuition. A natural way of navigating what was right in front of me. For me this meant exploring and researching diverse environments. It meant realising their complexities, not just through theory and data but through my direct, lived relation to them. It meant identifying specific but repeating patterns that constantly shaped my ways of seeing and relating to the world and the people around me. Each adventure and discovery felt like an unveiling of a greater reality I wasn’t previously attuned to, offering Invaluable insights and perspectives.
Somatic Therapy (in a series of upcoming articles, I will describe our working definition along with how this modality is practiced in real world settings) wasn’t anything I’d ever imagined doing. It emerged through experience, through what I felt was missing and believed was needed, and lastly but most importantly, through my care, passion and commitment to the human experience and to helping those around me.
To make all of this more graspable, let me take you back to when I was 15 years old. I remember this time vividly. It was the end of an era, and it really felt like one. It was the end of my childhood and so called ‘real-life’, was not just knocking, but kicking in the door, screaming:”what do you want to do in life? You have 12 months to decide!”
It baffles me till this day, especially because this is still true for so many of us . What a world we live in!!
Although this was confronting, I knew I wouldn’t survive another day of school. I loved dancing and I loved the arts more generally. But the ‘decide what you’ll do for the rest of your life’ thing didn’t seem to afford this privilege. It felt more like a deterministic pathway I’d be locked into.
I recall vividly how narrow my scope felt given the small German country town I grew up in combined with my constantly reinforced ‘classification’ within a very ‘traditional’ schooling system.
Growing up was hard. My family dynamics were incredibly challenging. Without saying more for now, I know plenty of you can relate. I see you.
Most of the time, I was either in survival mode or I was dancing. It was one of the two, always. Little did I know that this was my way of regulating. A way of expressing energy in motion. A way of “sense-making” through movement. A way of utilising those intense, pent-up sensations and the emotions I couldn’t yet express or make sense of otherwise.
That’s probably why I loved it so much. Movement has always moved me. I remember either breaking down crying or feeling on top of the world after dancing for hours alone one my bedroom. Often both, sequentially. Our bodies natural ability to self-regulate.*
(In therapeutic settings, for people with dysregulated nervous-systems, we use a technique called pedulation. Peter a Levine PhD. coined the term as part of Somatic Experiencing®. Pendulation involves moving conscious attention between sensations of bodily distress and sensations of bodily calm. This back and forth helps regulate the nervous system- teaching autonomic flexibility, process overwhelming emotions gradually, and over time build emotional capacity.)
Dancing actually goes back as far as I can remember. I taught dance in the village I grew up in. But dancing wasn’t a bill paying kinda job, so I had to pick something out of that pool of options available to me.
Luckily there was something else I really liked doing, colouring my hair and going to the hairdressers. I remember how much I loved going there as a young girl. I remember exactly how it made me feel. Of all the options available to me, it seemed like a great vessel for my creativity. But, even in those early days, I was much more passionate about helping people transform than I was about transforming hair alone. The hair salon was the first place where I ever recall feeling truly seen. It was the first place where I felt truly heard. And was the first place where I felt truly valued. Let that sink in for a moment.
I’d experienced this transformational space of uninterrupted attention. Someone, right there, with me, listening attentively. Someone that’s observing, noticing and really trying to understand what I was motivated to express. Someone that took me seriously while helping me see something that I hadn’t seen before.
This is what I wanted to do for living.
And I did. 10 years of doing hair with these as my core values. Making people feel seen, heard and valued all around the world.
Throughout this experience there was one thing that did really fascinated me about hair; its significance in society and how closely it is tied to our identity and self-worth.
The pressure hairdressers experience is enormous. If you’ve ever gotten a bad hair cut or sat anxiously in the chair, you will understand this. And if you ever experienced thinning or loosing your hair, you really know what I’m talking about. And I know this is true for many of us. Stress-related hair loss (just one of many types of hair-loss) is the most common cause of hair-loss worldwide. Most people experience this type of hair loss at least once in their lifetime. I did!
I saw this playing out. I felt this playing out. And I wondered, how can I help?
So I studied Trichology. Trichology is the science of hair and the scalp.
I then started working in Australia’s leading dermatology clinic. This opened up a whole new world and it certainly changed how I looked at hair. During my studies on human physiology I became both fascinated and perhaps a little obsessed with the nervous system. For the next 8 years I worked with people suffering from various auto-immune conditions, chronic stress, hormonal imbalances and many other stress related “disorders”. Through this everyday work, my ongoing research and my lived experience and personal practices, I began to connect the dots. Things started to make a lot of sense to me.
The one thing that connected all of the people I worked with was stress. And the one thing that really was not being addressed was stress! I not only observed this within the medical system but within holistic health practices as well.
Despite all the “right” advice, treatments and supplements I had to offer through Trichology, I was not able to help them with what I knew was ultimately, in most cases, the root cause of it all.
If you’ve ever told someone not to feel, think or do something (which could include yourself!), you know that usually doesn’t work very well. This is particularly true with stress. What I did find helped most, once again, was my ability to fully see, fully listen and fully reflect their inherent wholeness back to them, despite their hair and health conditions. It was the depth of relational connection and safety, the untangling of stories, making visible the invisible patterns and helping them realise that all of this was ultimately their survival physiology playing out in different ways. Not something they needed to run from or simply try to get rid of.
Much more can and will be said. For now let’s wrap this one up.
During my 18 years of studying beauty, identity, health and wellbeing, and the more complex whole that is the human person, I’ve realised that there is a wound that needs addressing. A wound that we ALL share. More on this in an upcoming article.
The way that our body expresses “dis-ease” is never just the body alone. And that the way the mind is shaped by our environment and our often painful life experiences is never just the mind alone. They are interrelated and interdependent systems and they need to heal and be treated as one. Not is isolation but in relation. Together, not alone.
Arriving at somatics felt like finally landing somewhere that is so fundamentally human, existentially real and universally true. All I want is to share it with people.
This is how I became a somatic therapist.
With love, Esther
