Somatotherapy offers several significant mental health benefits:

Stress and anxiety reduction:

Somatotherapy helps reduce stress and anxiety by using techniques such as conscious breathing and muscle relaxation13. These practices help regulate the nervous system, which is essential for managing anxious states.

Improved emotional management:

This approach explores and releases unresolved emotions, helping patients to better understand and manage their emotional states12. It promotes a better connection between body and mind, enabling increased awareness of emotional patterns.

Treatment of psychological disorders:

Somatotherapy has proven effective in the treatment of a variety of psychological disorders, including:DepressionPost-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)Anxiety and psychological trauma23

Increased self-awareness:

By developing greater body awareness, somatotherapy helps individuals better understand their reactions to stress and life events1. This heightened awareness promotes self-acceptance and reinforces personal boundaries.

Improved general well-being:

Somatotherapy aims to free the body of negative tensions and unblock emotions, contributing to a heightened sense of well-being and vitality12. It helps people reconnect with themselves and regain inner balance.

By combining bodily and psychological approaches, somatotherapy offers a holistic path to better mental health, treating both physical and emotional symptoms.

Somatotherapy offers several long-term mental health benefits:

- Significant reduction in anxiety: One study showed that anxiety trait decreased by 6.2 points after 10 sessions of somato-psychopedagogy (SPP), a form of somatotherapy1.

- Improved self-esteem: The same study revealed a 3.5-point increase in self-esteem after 10 sessions of SPP1.

- Improved trauma management: Somatotherapy helps to release and heal buried traumas by recognizing and responding to the body's signals3.

- Reduced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): A 2017 study showed that somatic experience helped relieve symptoms of PTSD and depression4.

- Better emotional regulation: Somatotherapy develops a link between body and mind, increasing the ability to regulate emotions.

- Chronic pain relief: One study has suggested that somatotherapy can alleviate back pain associated with PTSD.

These long-term effects are attributed to the combined action of first-person bodily experience and the enrichment of perceptual skills. Somatotherapy thus offers a holistic approach to improving mental health in the long term.

Somatotherapy offers several approaches to help release unresolved emotions:

Exploring physical sensations:

Somatotherapy focuses on exploring bodily sensations related to difficult emotions. By paying particular attention to muscle tension, pain and other physical manifestations, it helps to:

- Identify the areas of the body where emotions are stored

- Understand the link between physical sensations and emotional states

- Increase overall body awareness

- Emotional release techniques

Somatotherapy uses a variety of techniques to facilitate the release of unresolved emotions:

- Breathing exercises to regulate the nervous system

- Conscious movement and targeted stretching to release tension

- Therapeutic touch to unblock areas of tension

- Deep relaxation to access buried emotions

Body-mind integration

Somatotherapy aims to reconcile body and mind by :

- Developing a better connection between physical sensations and emotions

- Encouraging emotional expression through movement and dance therapy

- Using mindfulness meditation to be present to bodily and emotional sensations.

By working on these aspects, somatotherapy helps individuals to understand, accept and ultimately release unresolved emotions, thus promoting deeper and more lasting healing.