Power from Within: Exploring the Intersection of Somatics and LGBTQ+ Identity
As we continue celebrating queer and trans history and resistance during Pride Month and year-round, it feels important to discuss how embodiment plays a role in LGBTQ+ identity. Somatics is one way we can explore this intersection and deepen our individual and collective experiences of Pride!
Somatics is derived from the Greek word, soma, which means “the living organism in its wholeness”. Somatics, put simply, is the experience of the body from within. This includes the feeling-self and the sensing-self. Considering the world through a somatic lens requires a paradigm shift.
In a world that prioritizes top-down intellectual processing, listening to the body’s wisdom through a bottom-up approach can be quite radical. This also means shifting from prioritizing the mind to recognizing how the body stores and releases trauma and other emotions.
Somatics is important for many reasons. First, it allows us to access and release trauma stored in the body. It also helps us reconnect to the felt sense, or our ability to feel and notice within our inner landscape. Somatics also encourages us to regulate the nervous system in real time, while building embodied resilience through tracking, trusting, and responding to bodily cues. Most importantly for Pride Month, somatics can be particularly powerful for LGBTQ+ folks with complex trauma, chronic stress, or dissociation.
Trusting the innate wisdom and healing capacity of the body can be especially powerful in communities whose bodies have been marginalized and treated as “wrong” in some way. For LGBTQ+ folks, this can look like processing trauma, exploring identity, practicing self-acceptance, embodying consent and boundaries, fostering connection, and discovering the embodiment of social justice and collective liberation.
Somatics in practice for LGBTQ+ people can show up in many simple ways. Grounding through affirming clothing, voice, expression, or movement styles. Affirming diverse sexualities, relational styles, and embodied intimacy. Encouraging movement to be fluid, playful, and affirming of queer expression. Centering body awareness practices that are consent-based at our own pace. These are just a few of the myriad of ways that queer and trans people can center somatics in our lives.
Note: this post is based on a presentation of the same name that I recently co-presented with my colleague, Mary Koenig, LMSW. I would like to offer much gratitude for their collaboration and development of these ideas!
If you feel called to explore somatics, this Pride Month and beyond, with Jacklyn or one of our clinicians, click the link HERE.
References:
Haines, S. (2019). The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice. North Atlantic Books.
Mischke-Reeds, M. (2018). Somatic Psychotherapy Toolbox. PESI Publishing & Media.