Somatic Experiencing and Intuitive Eating: Reconnecting with Your Body’s Wisdom
During COVID when my caseload of clients was a bit lower and I had more time on my hands, I became super curious about Intuitive Eating and how it could be useful in my and my client’s lives. After reading the book, I took the training with Evelyn Tribole, a co-creator of Intuitive Eating, and became a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. (Learn more about Intuitive Eating here.) Because of my love of body-based interventions, I started reading about Somatic Experiencing. After three years of training, I have now been a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner for one year. It has been an incredible process to utilize both of these modalities in a therapeutic setting because they compliment each other so well. Somatic Experiencing is a body-based modality that helps clients release stored trauma in the body, and Intuitive Eating heavily relies on interoceptive awareness to be able to have a healthy relationship with food. Let’s dig in (pun intended) to how these two work so well together and how they could benefit you!
What is Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic Experiencing is a body-based (“soma”) modality for healing and releasing trauma stored by the body. If you have ever read or heard of The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, this is exactly what we are talking about here. The nervous system can get stuck in patterns of fight, flight, or freeze after a traumatic experience, leaving the person to experience chronic stress throughout the rest of their life if gone untreated.
How Somatic Experiencing Heals Trauma
Somatic Experiencing works by helping clients to feel into their physiological states in order to identify where their nervous system is as a response to the topic being discussed in session. The whole purpose of this is to help clients “complete” responses so that they can get unstuck. An example of completing a trauma response would be something like this:
Mary comes to work with me as a 40 year old woman who was in a car crash and now has difficulty while driving or riding in a car, especially on the highway. Since the trauma, she finds that she has a very high heart rate and her body goes very rigid. After working with a therapist who utilizes Somatic Experiencing, she realized that not being able to stop in time during the accident was her incomplete self-protective response. Through connection with her sympathetic charge in her nervous system (the sensations related to fight or flight), she was able to feel into and reenact slamming on the breaks and turning the steering wheel in time to keep herself safe. After her session, she has been able to drive on the highway with minimal anxiety.
Trauma and The Link Between the Body and Eating Habits
Without a doubt, trauma impacts our eating habits. When our nervous systems spend too much time in a sympathetic charge (fight or flight), our digestive system is impacted. Think about it like this: if you are in danger, the last thing that our body needs to be doing is stopping to eat. All of the energy required to be in fight or flight is used on getting blood and energy to the extremities of the body, not the stomach and digestion. Therefore, if we are chronically stressed or have experienced trauma that isn’t resolved, we can have little to no awareness of hunger and fullness cues.
The relationship between trauma and eating habits is clear. Trauma creates dysregulation in the mind and body. What do a lot of people do when they are dysregulated? They seek regulation via any route that is accessible to them. For a lot of people, this includes eating. Eating to get soothing sensory input or to distract from difficult emotions, memories, or sensations works really well. It is quick and easy. There is no inherent problem with occasionally eating to self-soothe, but it can have serious drawbacks if used as a long-term coping strategy.
The good news is you can heal your relationship with food through Somatic Therapy.
Healing Your Relationship With Food Through Somatic Experiencing
Somatic Experiencing therapy relies heavily on interoception, or the ability to sense and be aware of internal body sensations. Having better insight into these sensations not only allows us to be able to tune into hunger and fullness cues, but to be able to get the nuanced version of those cues. By being aware of body signals at a more granular level, we can know more about how much or how soon we might need to eat.
(You can listen to my favorite podcast about Interoceptive Awareness here!)
Not only does Somatic Experiencing therapy foster the interoception also required for Intuitive Eating, it allows for deeper connection in general to the ability to connect to sensation. Sometimes, a traumatized nervous system likes to freeze. This looks like disassociation, or being “checked out.” A lot of the time, if we are checked out enough, we have little to no clue what is going on in our body. With the expert guidance of a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, more safety can be created so that touching into sensation is possible. If there is no safety, there is no incentive to be present. Somatic Experiencing helps to create this safety.
We are more able to intuitively eat when we are able to be present. Presence requires regulation, and traumatized systems aren’t regulated very often. This work helps clients to know how to care for themselves on a deeper level, allowing them to be connected to the present and overcoming a negative relationship with food. The work required to heal trauma with Somatic Experiencing directly impacts a person’s ability to be aware and engaged during the eating process. Not only does this mean they have greater capacity to mindfully eat, but to find true satisfaction and joy with food as well!
(Curious about Somatic Experiencing? Read about it here.)
Practical Intuitive Eating Tips
Somatic Experiencing is a bottom-up technique; meaning that we aren’t using our intellect to tell our body how to behave to reduce symptoms; rather, we are utilizing our body sensations in order to inform us how to better take care of ourselves and close trauma loops. This can make giving specific “tips and tricks” hard. All nervous systems and lived experiences are different, therefore regulating them to have a better relationship with food will require different interventions and techniques, all led by the body.
However, there are things that we can do to get curious about what our body needs, especially when it comes to food.
Mindfullness and Body Scans for Nervous System Regulation
Mindfulness and body scans can help people to identify what is going on in their systems. We can get a lot of great information about how we are emotionally and physically by slowing down, getting quiet, and going inward in this way. Clients could either sit quietly by themselves and self-direct a body scan, or they can find a myriad of guided meditations for interoceptive awareness online.
New to meditation? Watch this 5 Minute Guide to Meditating.
Slowing Down with Breathwork and Grounding Exercises
For people who hurry while they are eating or emotionally eat, slowing down beforehand is a great idea. Breathwork or other grounding exercises can be immensely helpful here. It doesn’t have to take a long time or be super involved. You would be surprised how easily it is to get to a more aware place before a snack or a meal.
Understand Your Patterns and Trauma Triggers
One of the greatest tips as a therapist who does Intuitive Eating work that I could give is to understand your patterns. Take the information you have learned with somatic work to connect the dots between your eating habits. Does a stressful day at work cause you to emotionally eat at night? Does overstimulation from your kids have you hiding in the bathroom eating chips? Are you too frequently busy during the day to feed yourself adequately and lead to a binge later in the evening? Once we know better, we can do better and take better care of ourselves.
As a therapist, I’m so passionate about combining these two modalities in a way that suits every client's needs and meets them where they are in their unique trauma and food journeys. Getting to understand my client’s unique set of experiences and needs allows us to collaborate on the best approach to meeting their mental health goals. The intricate web of nervous systems and eating patterns can feel so confusing to tease out on your own, so I encourage you to find somebody who can help support you to do just that.
Start Your Somatic Experiencing and Intuitive Eating Journey with a Licensed Kansas City Therapist
If you are curious about booking an appointment with me for Somatic Experiencing and Intuitive Eating to get started on your healing journey, contact me. As a therapist, I’m so passionate about combining these two modalities in a way that suits every client's needs and meets them where they are in their unique trauma and food journeys. Getting to understand my client’s unique set of experiences and needs allows us to collaborate on the best approach to meeting their mental health goals. The intricate web of nervous systems and eating patterns can feel so confusing to tease out on your own, so I encourage you to reach out for support!
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Stevie Spiegel is a Licensed Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner located in Kansas City. She uses Somatic Experiencing as her main body-based trauma healing modality, as well as EMDR. As an Intuitive Eating Counselor, she uses these principles to help her clients challenge their relationship with their cultural misconceptions about their body and food. Learn More >
