“I get what you’re experiencing. I feel you, I can empathize.” When I hear this sentence, I start to relax, my heart opens, and my whole body has a sense of not being alone.
Does this happen to you, too?
In therapy we call it somatic empathy - a right-brain to right-brain connection; a relationship built on tuning into each other’s emotions and body sensations, and feeling moved by another.
Trying to understand people only from a cognitive place, without somatic empathy, can end up being like analyzing under a microscope.
Maybe you’ll see something in a lot greater detail, but it’s not going to heal and nurture whatever you’re looking at.
Health care practitioners can do harm if they don’t practice somatic empathy.
In my own personal journey of healing complex trauma many years ago, I would encounter well meaning, but dysregulating practitioners who would ask me questions from their mind, but not their body.
I wouldn’t sense them opening into feeling my inner experience with me.
And that would reinforce the sense of fear and shame I had, trapped from early childhood in my tense muscles and tingling skin - because the essence of relational trauma is overwhelming or unbearable feelings that you have to feel alone.
I’d think, “No one wants to feel this with me because it’s unbearable for them, too. It’s because there’s something wrong with me. I’ll be trapped in this feeling alone, forever.”
It was an experience I encountered over and over again while trying to navigate the healthcare system to find help.
Until I met a trauma informed doctor who showed me she could, and was willing, to feel my pain.
But more than being trauma informed, I could sense it was really because she had done her own deep inner work to be able to feel her pain, as well.
She was able to hold my pain in her embodied presence. She was able to be with me in my intense emotions without turning away or getting dysregulated by them.
Rather than ask me questions to get an answer, she waited in moments of silence with me so we could feel together.
Instead of seeing symptoms as an issue to get rid of, she related to them like sacred clues; the body’s language and cry for help. When I cried, I’d see tears in her eyes, too.
She held space for me to cry and grieve - she recognized the emotions coming up were not only natural to feel, but were the path to healing itself - the body finally releasing trapped unbearable emotions that I hadn’t been able to access without another person who was able to feel them with me.
Her somatic empathy turned into the beginning of my somatic empathy - the ability to feel with others. I’m forever grateful for this gift. Somatic empathy is the antidote to trauma.
A few tips to practice somatic empathy, with yourself and in your relationships:
Allow yourself to slow down and sense into the moment with your whole being.
Notice where your center of awareness is - if it’s in your head (where our society often trains us to live), see if you can drop your awareness down into your heart.
Remind yourself you don’t have to figure things out only with the thinking mind.
Encourage yourself to be curious and linger in the space of not having to know everything.
Rest in the heartspace, allowing yourself to feel a little longer or more deeply.
See if you can sense into the heart and rhythm of yourself or another person; just be with your / their energy without having to know or fix anything.
Allow your heart to break open and grieve. Grief opens our hearts to ourselves and others. It is a bridge of connection and healing.