Re-Bodying Life: An Artistic-Somatic Approach to Trauma

Abstract

This study was conducted to increase the understanding and explore the value of combined somatic and artistic approaches for healing trauma. The Personal Embodiment program offered at the Tamalpa Institute, which utilizes somatic and expressive arts methods, was the proposed therapeutic model. Using a depth psychological perspective, the literature review examined theoretical formulations in the field of depth psychology, somatic psychotherapy, and expressive arts therapy. Interviews were conducted with five individuals who had completed the Personal Embodiment program and who had also experienced trauma. A descriptive phenomenological method was used to analyze the interviews and discern themes that arose from each of them. Six themes were found that are essential elements of the lived embodied experience: (a) Inhabiting the body; (b) Integrating: physical, emotional and imaginal/mental levels of awareness; (c) Artful communication: aligning inner experience with outer expression; (d) Sense of belonging: being seen, held and accepted; (e) Revitalizing self: expanding and deepening channels of creative expression; and (f) Embodying traumatic experience. The constituent themes showed how the essential roles of the body and creativity, the program’s specific methods, and the group environment were primary in the participants’ trauma healing. Participants reported reductions in psychosomatic symptoms and described how somatic-artistic interventions positively affected their lives by increasing their ability to connect, self-regulate, and identify and express a fuller range of experience.