I have a relative who is a psychologist. I will send this to them to get their reaction.
I think that people who have a need for therapy, maybe all of us at one time or another in our lives, will entertain the possibility that any of the methods used by therapists can solve their problem. It comes down to initial belief that they can be helped. Sometimes, simply talking about a thing that has been bothering you is the best therapy and in that way, the best therapist is someone who is a good listener who can respond to the person's ramblings in a non-judgmental way so that the subject can be made to feel that the monkey on their back has been captured and caged.
The S. E. therapy involving touch and finding a calm place inside to sweep your troubles seems to be an extension of the idea that physical touch and intimacy is important to mental health which to me makes sense since touching someone helps them know that they are not alone and even if the hands are cold, there is only a short time before body heat transfers and things are more in equilibrium.
Yeah. For that part peer pressure can be important. When your closest friends make a habit of pointing out your issues then it can be easier to seek help because you know your friends support you.
Stimulating different parts of the body stimulates different parts of the brain[1]. Through cross talking neurones this might influence parts of your brain to be rewired differently and relieve some over burdened circuits, just like it might happen with traumatic events, but the rigour and precision by which this can be done is still very much an open question.
Hyperfocus on specific body parts by providers seems to be a major failure mode of modern health care. The universe doesn't care that mankind decided to split the body into N systems for the sole purpose of creating specialties to provide health care.
When you say "mind" do you mean consciousness, or System 1 in Kahneman's terms? Or do you also include nonconscious nervous system activity including Kahneman's System 2 and other embodied cognition?
Even though a mind may arise from a body, could the computational processes characteristic of a mind not also be activated from a non-body?
I'm reading and influenced right now by Kinds Of Minds by Daniel Dennett.
I shifted my career away from tech to therapy[0] and took lengthy trainings in Hakomi, a method similar to Somatic Experiencing mentioned in the article. It's truly amazing how much more profound sessions can be with experiential therapy that includes the body. I have really benefited from somatic therapies myself and have given loads of sessions that others have found useful.
sell addictive consumables in a poor neighboorhood with a lot of neon and big posters in your windows; you will make much more money for yourself than "enabling deep experiences for others"; second plus, people will eventually hate you, but you have money, maybe learn to use guns too.
It's impossible to give a detailed explanation in every moderation comment, or even in 1% of them. It takes me many minutes, often an hour or more, and sometimes even several hours, to write a thoughtful, in-depth explanation, and then I have to vet it as carefully as I can to try to make sure that I haven't inadvertently made things worse.
Much as I would like to "add to the conversation" everywhere I post, I don't have hundreds of hours a day. I simply have no choice in most cases but to point to the guidelines and trust commenters to figure out how they might have broken them.
But as I have some extra time just now (which I didn't yesterday when I saw your reply) I have come back to try to give you more information.
First, your GP comment was not substantive. It pattern-matched to a snarky putdown ("$group-being-put-down rediscovers $generic-related thing"). You may not have intended it that way, but there wasn't enough information there to track any better intent. When your intent is not to post a snarky putdown, you need to include enough information in your comment to disambiguate that. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Second, it was nationalistic/regional flamebait because you were putting down one region in favor of another. That leads to hellish flamewars and users can't do that here—regardless of which nation/region they're downing or upping. This applies even when you feel like you're merely defending one region against something unfair in another (because in fact it always feels that way).
Third, even if we ignore the first two points, you didn't engage with anything specific or interesting in the article. You simply took the most superficial detail (the word 'somatic' in the title) and combined it with the most superficial detail about yoga (it's also 'somatic'*). This was a classic case not only of a shallow dismissal but also of a generic tangent, which the site guidelines ask commenters not to do—because it usually leads to shallow, generic, and ultimately nasty discussion.
A better comment would have taken specific, interesting things about somatic therapy and linked them to specific, interesting things about yoga in a way that illuminated the connection rather than denouncing with pejoratives.
Your follow-up comment did a little better job of this - but "movement, consciousness and health" is still much too generic to capture anything meaningful about the somatic variations of psychotherapy that are the topic of the article. Meanwhile your sentence "the west insists on reinventing the wheel and marketing these “discoveries” as their own invention" is more nationalistic flamebait of exactly the type we ask users not to post here.
I completely understand the feeling when something you're close to feels "taken" by some other entity and passed off as its own. I have that reaction with things I care about too. But I'm afraid you misread the somatic therapists and jumped to an incorrect conclusion, in at least two ways. First, what they're doing is not at all the same thing as yoga. Second, they're well aware of the similarities with yoga and credit it. They're not passing it off as their own invention. In fact, the Bassel van der Kolk book about trauma which is central to the article contains an entire chapter about yoga.
(* and btw yes, I know that most forms of yoga do not involve somatic poses and that the word yoga does not imply it.)
I completely believe that somatic therapy can be helpful. I have over the last few months been taking an SSRI to help with genralized anxiety. There has been a small effect in my mood/thinking, but for me the largest change that I noticed was actually in my body. I no longer get tension headaches, I don't have horrible gastro problems, my skin has cleared up. I went from being the most ticklish person I knew to being barely ticklish at all.
I feel strongly that these changes in my bodily function are affecting my mood more than the reverse.
> I feel strongly that these changes in my bodily function are affecting my mood more than the reverse.
Depression isn’t just a “mood” disorder. Everything you described (headaches, digestion, hormonal effects, alertness to touch) is controlled by your nervous system and modulated or controlled by your brain.
It doesn’t make sense to separate them and try to draw an arrow of causality because they’re one in the same.
Medical science has known this for a very long time, which is why standard depression inventories include questions about things like gastrointestinal problems.
Interestingly enough, many SSRI-treated patients don’t notice their mood improvements very much because the changes are gradual over many months. Usually if you interview their family members they’ll say the change is more dramatic than the patient self-rates.
Oh I completely agree that they are connected. I just noticed before starting that I would regularly feel the effects of stress in my body and that would put my in a defensive, exhausted, irritated mood. It is hard to have a good time when gas makes it hard to walk straight.
The thing that made me start the drugs was actually this realization that physical anxiety was preceding any anxious thoughts. For years I had done talk therapy (which was very helpful) but that therapy was mostly based around making me realize my anxious thoughts weren't "real". As soon as I stopped having the physical symptoms now I don't have anxious thoughts to begin with.
SSRIs absolutely destroy sex drive and ability to enjoy it for a frightening large fraction of people. For people that take them for extended time that sometimes becomes permanent! People should know the tradeoff they're making and not make the decision lightly.
I recently learned a possible mechanism that could explain this especially in men. Some SSRIs can make men's prolactin levels skyrocket to multiples of the normal value for men and this effect seems to sometimes persist for months after. I've found inconspicuously worded allusions to this in open medical literature, but it doesn't seem widely known or studied. Much of my knowledge is anecdotal from seeing friends and families before and after bloodwork. If they weren't privileged people with great health insurance they would never have gotten the labs to know that the havoc wreaked on their hormones.
Yeah. I don't have as much of a drive, but I haven't really had any problems with sex. I think it helps that my lovers and I have pretty crazy sex so it is rather easy to get excited :)
> The other side was more woo-woo: You’re vowing to be each other’s person, and you can’t change your name? What’s wrong with you?” With her therapist, she learned to focus on “superhelpful data” from her body, as Petersel put it, to “trust the visceral. It was clarifying.”
I think it's just a matter of having someone to listen to you. The focus on the legs or body parts body is interesting, but I think it's more of a helpful prop to keep the interaction going. Doctors and other types of therapists might be too rushed, busy, judgmental, etc. They don't have time to listen to anxieties and worries and give life advice.
People used to visit friends and neighbors more to listen to each other's issues and offer advice and support. But nowadays, and especially after the pandemic, people are more alienated, they forgot how to talk to each other. The therapy session provide a structured way for that interaction. It could somatic therapy, mediation, dance therapy, acupuncture.
It's derived from the Greek "soma," relating to the body
I have no evidence for it, but to me, the context of 1984 suggests the latin "somnus," to sleep or dream
I think the soma drug from Brave New World (not 1984) is from sóma, a ritualistic drink / drink of the gods in Vedic literature. Huxley did indeed have an interest in Vedic mysticism according to the BNW Wikipedia article.
33 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 77.7 ms ] threadI think that people who have a need for therapy, maybe all of us at one time or another in our lives, will entertain the possibility that any of the methods used by therapists can solve their problem. It comes down to initial belief that they can be helped. Sometimes, simply talking about a thing that has been bothering you is the best therapy and in that way, the best therapist is someone who is a good listener who can respond to the person's ramblings in a non-judgmental way so that the subject can be made to feel that the monkey on their back has been captured and caged.
The S. E. therapy involving touch and finding a calm place inside to sweep your troubles seems to be an extension of the idea that physical touch and intimacy is important to mental health which to me makes sense since touching someone helps them know that they are not alone and even if the hands are cold, there is only a short time before body heat transfers and things are more in equilibrium.
I have no idea what I'm talking about.
This part is definitely key. The other part is believing they need help or should work on something.
[1] https://twitter.com/chrost_hugo/status/1660788882559078400/p...
Even though a mind may arise from a body, could the computational processes characteristic of a mind not also be activated from a non-body?
I'm reading and influenced right now by Kinds Of Minds by Daniel Dennett.
https://www.amazon.com/Kinds-Minds-Understanding-Consciousne...
[0] http://glench.com/WhyIQuitTechAndBecameATherapist/
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is a very deep connection between movement, consciousness and health
This has been studied and practiced for thousands of years by millions of people
Yet the west insists on reinventing the wheel and marketing these “discoveries” as their own invention
Please don’t dismiss my comments as shallow if you are just going to point to some policy instead of actually adding to the conversation
It's impossible to give a detailed explanation in every moderation comment, or even in 1% of them. It takes me many minutes, often an hour or more, and sometimes even several hours, to write a thoughtful, in-depth explanation, and then I have to vet it as carefully as I can to try to make sure that I haven't inadvertently made things worse.
Much as I would like to "add to the conversation" everywhere I post, I don't have hundreds of hours a day. I simply have no choice in most cases but to point to the guidelines and trust commenters to figure out how they might have broken them.
But as I have some extra time just now (which I didn't yesterday when I saw your reply) I have come back to try to give you more information.
First, your GP comment was not substantive. It pattern-matched to a snarky putdown ("$group-being-put-down rediscovers $generic-related thing"). You may not have intended it that way, but there wasn't enough information there to track any better intent. When your intent is not to post a snarky putdown, you need to include enough information in your comment to disambiguate that. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Second, it was nationalistic/regional flamebait because you were putting down one region in favor of another. That leads to hellish flamewars and users can't do that here—regardless of which nation/region they're downing or upping. This applies even when you feel like you're merely defending one region against something unfair in another (because in fact it always feels that way).
Third, even if we ignore the first two points, you didn't engage with anything specific or interesting in the article. You simply took the most superficial detail (the word 'somatic' in the title) and combined it with the most superficial detail about yoga (it's also 'somatic'*). This was a classic case not only of a shallow dismissal but also of a generic tangent, which the site guidelines ask commenters not to do—because it usually leads to shallow, generic, and ultimately nasty discussion.
A better comment would have taken specific, interesting things about somatic therapy and linked them to specific, interesting things about yoga in a way that illuminated the connection rather than denouncing with pejoratives.
Your follow-up comment did a little better job of this - but "movement, consciousness and health" is still much too generic to capture anything meaningful about the somatic variations of psychotherapy that are the topic of the article. Meanwhile your sentence "the west insists on reinventing the wheel and marketing these “discoveries” as their own invention" is more nationalistic flamebait of exactly the type we ask users not to post here.
I completely understand the feeling when something you're close to feels "taken" by some other entity and passed off as its own. I have that reaction with things I care about too. But I'm afraid you misread the somatic therapists and jumped to an incorrect conclusion, in at least two ways. First, what they're doing is not at all the same thing as yoga. Second, they're well aware of the similarities with yoga and credit it. They're not passing it off as their own invention. In fact, the Bassel van der Kolk book about trauma which is central to the article contains an entire chapter about yoga.
(* and btw yes, I know that most forms of yoga do not involve somatic poses and that the word yoga does not imply it.)
I feel strongly that these changes in my bodily function are affecting my mood more than the reverse.
Depression isn’t just a “mood” disorder. Everything you described (headaches, digestion, hormonal effects, alertness to touch) is controlled by your nervous system and modulated or controlled by your brain.
It doesn’t make sense to separate them and try to draw an arrow of causality because they’re one in the same.
Medical science has known this for a very long time, which is why standard depression inventories include questions about things like gastrointestinal problems.
Interestingly enough, many SSRI-treated patients don’t notice their mood improvements very much because the changes are gradual over many months. Usually if you interview their family members they’ll say the change is more dramatic than the patient self-rates.
The thing that made me start the drugs was actually this realization that physical anxiety was preceding any anxious thoughts. For years I had done talk therapy (which was very helpful) but that therapy was mostly based around making me realize my anxious thoughts weren't "real". As soon as I stopped having the physical symptoms now I don't have anxious thoughts to begin with.
Yeah. Have you tried having sex on that stuff yet?
I recently learned a possible mechanism that could explain this especially in men. Some SSRIs can make men's prolactin levels skyrocket to multiples of the normal value for men and this effect seems to sometimes persist for months after. I've found inconspicuously worded allusions to this in open medical literature, but it doesn't seem widely known or studied. Much of my knowledge is anecdotal from seeing friends and families before and after bloodwork. If they weren't privileged people with great health insurance they would never have gotten the labs to know that the havoc wreaked on their hormones.
I think it's just a matter of having someone to listen to you. The focus on the legs or body parts body is interesting, but I think it's more of a helpful prop to keep the interaction going. Doctors and other types of therapists might be too rushed, busy, judgmental, etc. They don't have time to listen to anxieties and worries and give life advice.
People used to visit friends and neighbors more to listen to each other's issues and offer advice and support. But nowadays, and especially after the pandemic, people are more alienated, they forgot how to talk to each other. The therapy session provide a structured way for that interaction. It could somatic therapy, mediation, dance therapy, acupuncture.