Mind + Body
A lot of us were taught, by school, by work, by health care, by talk therapy itself, to live mostly from the neck up. To trust thinking, manage feeling, with little to no emphasis on the body except when it stops working or starts demanding attention. However, the body has been carrying things, including trauma, grief, racism, exhaustion, chronic stress, and the residue of relationships and environments that were not safe, and it is asking, sometimes loudly, to be included in the healing.
Mind and body, in our practice, are not separate departments.The integration of body and mind in healing is older than psychology. Indigenous, African, Asian, and Latin American traditions have always understood healing as embodied, through breath, movement, rhythm, song, ritual, and relationship with the more-than-human world. The contemporary clinical conversation about working with the body draws on much of this older wisdom, and we try to be honest about that lineage rather than treating body-based practice as a Western innovation.
Why the body matters in this work:
A few things become clearer when the body is included:
- Trauma is stored in the body, not only in narrative. People can tell a story without feeling it, or feel something intensely without being able to tell its story. The body remembers what cognition has filed away.
- Nervous system state shapes what is possible. A person in a flooded, dysregulated state cannot do the same therapeutic work as a person in a regulated, settled state. Talking when the nervous system is in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn is talking to a body that is not available for processing.
- Many adaptations live in the body. Hypervigilance, dissociation, collapse, the bracing that comes with chronic stress, the held breath, the locked jaw. These often respond more readily to body-based intervention than to talk alone.
- Emotion is physiological before it is verbal. Working with emotion at the level of body sensation is often more direct than working with it at the level of language about it.
- Pleasure, rest, and reconnection also live in the body. Healing is not only about processing pain. It is also about rebuilding the body’s capacity to feel safety, ease, joy, and connection.
The mainstream wellness conversation has often defaulted to a particular kind of body, including white, thin, young, able-bodied, cisgender, and middle-class. Folks with disability, folks living with chronic illness, fat folks, Black and brown folks, trans folks, people who have survived sexual harm, people who have been racialized as threats, have not been served equally by mainstream somatic spaces.
We are not interested in body-positive language that papers over these realities. We work with the actual body in front of us, with attention to what it has lived through and what it has been told. The body of someone who has been surveilled their entire life has different work to do than the body of someone who has not. The body of someone living with chronic pain has a different relationship with movement and stillness than another body might. We honor these specifics.
What this work can look like at MLC:
Mind-body work is woven into our therapy rather than offered as a separate specialty. In practice, it might include:
- Noticing what your body is doing as we talk, including where you feel things, when your breath changes, when something tightens or loosens, when you are present and when you have left the room without realizing it
- Slowing down enough to be with what is happening in the body, instead of moving past it to get to the next thought
- Breath, grounding, and orientation practices that help the nervous system find its way back to regulation without forcing it
- Somatic approaches to trauma and stress, integrated with approaches like EMDR and parts work
- Working with the specific body in front of us, including disability, chronic illness, body size, transness, race, gender, and history of sexual violence, with attention to what would be healing rather than performative
- Reconnecting with pleasure, rest, and sensation as legitimate sources of information rather than indulgences
- Honoring the body’s pace. The body cannot be rushed, and we will not rush it.
The therapists at MLC bring this work because we know talking alone has limits, and those limits show up most clearly with trauma, chronic stress, racism, and patterns that formed before language was available.
