The NYT talks somatics

To which I say...eh?

Hello, folks, particularly new subscribers! And apologies for the radio silence. People talk about summer as a time when things slow down, and yet for me it always seems like everything gets more intense instead. Normally I’d also let you know I’m taking a break, but I don’t feel like I did that adequately, either! Regardless, though: here’s my latest—a review of an in-depth-ish piece in the Times about Somatic Experiencing.

---

Last month, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published a pretty big piece about somatic therapy, which is nice! And I wouldn’t have known about it except for a note from astute reader and friend Elizabeth Hunter, who kindly sent me a gift link and said she’d like to hear my thoughts.

Back when I wrote my earlier blog, I used to do searches and see what was coming around in the news about body-mind work pretty frequently. There honestly wasn’t much. So I signal-boosted and analyzed wherever I could.

These days, everybody seems to be talking about either trauma, attachment, or somatics. But it still feels like kind of a big deal to see the NYT talk about the big pioneers like Peter Levine and Stephen Porges and Pat Ogden.

So what are my thoughts? I gotta be honest: mostly I think “about damn time,” with a side of “stop looking at us like we’re museum specimens.”

I’ve been thinking and writing about this stuff for a whiiiiiile, and admittedly it’s a little frustrating to see the mainstream catching up, just as it is with anything that seems sensical, even self-evident, to me. I don’t want to be a hipster about this, but like, I was into somatics before it was cool. (See also: I was into polyamory before the coinage of “polycule” and “ENM.”)

Kidding aside, I certainly don’t mind when the larger culture finally becomes aware of something important but niche, and begins to take it seriously. It does annoy me, though, the way it so often happens: the Respected Authority introduces the subject with a certain breathless enthusiasm, chronicling its “sudden” trendiness, then casts doubt on it from all directions lest a reader think our reporter on the ground has been unduly taken in by the latest craze.

For the most part, this piece was gentle. To his credit, the writer did a sample session with a somatic therapist, a master of social work with further training in Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine’s work). He’s open, and introduces the subject with curiosity and some vulnerability.

Still, something about the quote marks around certain exchanges, the opening line with its slightly absurd tone (“After requesting my permission, Emily Price, the therapist on my laptop screen, spoke to my feet”), made me mistrust the general sensitivity and respect of the article’s first half. Because it seems that pieces like this can never do a profile of anything even vaguely outré without being sure to subtly dismantle its apparently outrageous claims by the end.

Are your children being seduced by somatic therapy techniques created by Satanists? You decide.

But what if the guy who came up with this was a hippie??

What starts as a touching, if gently skeptical, description of the writer’s interactions with Price shifts into an exploration of the principles and history of somatic therapy approaches, touching briefly on Bessel van der Kolk, and then landing on Peter Levine, who he worked with in a Somatic Experiencing training he attended.

When he reaches Levine, the writer begins pointing out the PhD psychologist’s “leap” in reasoning behind his theories, then makes him look a bit batty by describing his imagined meals with Einstein in the ‘70s. It’s not the overt, let’s-make-fun-of-this-guy kind of thing; it’s more like let’s make a statement that sounds gently dubious, then let the speaker tell his own story a bit — the classic dig-your-own-grave scenario:

“As Levine worked on his biophysics dissertation about stress and on his formulation of S.E., he was encouraged, in Berkeley, by Albert Einstein. Though Einstein had been dead for almost 20 years, he sat down with Levine and engaged him in weekly Socratic dialogues, helping him develop his thoughts over the course of a year, at Levine’s favorite restaurant, the Beggar’s Banquet. There, Levine insisted that the waitress bring Einstein a bowl of the same soup Levine was having, always ‘a green vegetable purée,’ he recalled nostalgically.”

Up until this point, the writer seems gently interested in these techniques, even gaining some benefits from them. At this point, though, you can practically hear the whirr of him spinning his finger in a circle by his head.

After a bit more in this vein, the writer moves on to polyvagal theory, which he of course puts in scare quotes, then explains it thusly: “Within the vagus, the theory posits, there is a discrete tract that is supposedly responsible for particular adaptive emotions.” He adds that critics find it “full of unproven notions,” and notes that the woman introducing the work “seemed to acknowledge its tenuousness even as she defended it.”

Sigh. I guess…I think it’s fine to be skeptical, and to want scientific underpinnings for everything. But also, y’all…I’m just tired. I’m tired of people finding things that seem effective and helpful for people outside the world of drugs and capitalistic “get over it so you can get back to work” solutions, and of people in authority well-actuallying it all into oblivion. For example: did the sentence above really need both “the theory posits” and a side-eye-invoking “supposedly”? And even without the damning “unproven,” the word “notions” by itself carries a tone of dismissive scorn.

Could this insane-sounding thing actually work? yOu dECidE

The article continues with anecdotes of three different clients, each with quite disparate issues (some of them harrowing, like systematic racism and sexual assault) they’re bringing to Somatic Experiencing, all of whom seem to have gotten significant results from it. Again, the writer’s respectful and compassionate tone returns.

But he just can’t help ending the piece with the misgivings that Price returned to him with later on, which, tellingly, are not about Somatic Experiencing itself but worries about its over-promising. And of course when people find a new possibility for healing their previously intractable illnesses, they can build up so much hope that any dilution of the treatment with other methods, or failure to deliver miracles, can be crushing. And yes, probably it’s important for people promoting the modality, like any modality, to not talk about it as if it’s the second coming of whatever.

To wrap up, he acknowledges the allure of somatic work, and indeed nearly feels himself taken in by it! (Oh no.):

Romanticism and the return to nature, the holistic and the spiritual, are all part of the longing. There’s the hope for release in the primal and salvation in the mystical. The allure may be strongest for those of us who live mostly in our minds, even as our minds whisper back skeptically, protesting the irrational and warning of self-deception.

But he does allow, oh-so-kindly, that minds are quick to judge, and that “Below may lie the possibility of healing.”

Okay.

I mean I don’t mean to be a jerk about this, and I was actually shocked to find in the comments that many felt this to be a puff piece, profiling a new-agey technique from a totally sympathetic perspective. And maybe that’s part of what’s going on here: as the wonderful Ozy Brennan recently discussed, if a journalist doesn’t fully engage in egregious both-sides-ism, they’re immediately accused of bias.

Spreading uncertainty is easier because the news media tries to be balanced and objective…The problem is that it’s easy to make it look like there’s a controversy when there really isn’t….Trying to figure out which of the groups is telling the truth isn’t your job—you’re a reporter, not an opinion columnist. So the journalist reports “the entire scientific consensus of the public health community” and “three retired physicists who are prolific writers” as if they’re equally credible sources which are equally likely to have uncovered the truth.

…Erring on the side of objectivity means that you devote a lot of page space to beliefs that are flat-out wrong—so you make your readers actively stupider and less informed. Erring on the side of trying to report the facts as you see them winds up collapsing the distinction between a news article and an opinion column.

Perhaps that’s the culprit for these pieces that always tiptoe so delicately through these topics, holding out hope and good stories but ultimately pulling back in doubt and even scorn. Maybe they’re fearful that if they’re too open to something that feels good, they’ll become vaccine-denying conspiracy theorists. Or that if they don’t constantly hammer on the downsides of an exciting if slightly fringe thing that some people are doing to try and help in this messed-up world, that both the vaccine-denying conspiracy theorists and the radical skeptics will troll them half to death.

Not that they don’t have anything to worry about, as Katelyn Jetalina recently wrote.

Harassment against scientists is out of control

Also don’t get me wrong: I can skeptic with the best of them. And I absolutely hate the way white-light-New-Age toxic positivity and white-lady-Instagram commodifiction of spirituality has poisoned the entire well for anyone who really wants to reach people with effective healing, and to help people improve their lives.

But I’m gonna keep doing it anyway. And my complaints notwithstanding…this article is honestly an okay start. I feel like I’ve been saying things like that since 2012, but well…