Written By: Frances Thomas
Ani Waggoner has battled anorexia for 28 years. She’s been to seven different treatment facilities, and cycled in and out of recovery for her entire adult life. It wasn’t until her last residential stay, at The Renfrew Center in Florida, that she hit a breakthrough. “A lot of trauma is ingrained in my body, and my eating disorder played into that,” she says. Starvation was her way of punishing a body that she didn’t trust.
This insight occurred in Renfrew’s movement room, where Waggoner was receiving somatic therapy. While progressing through slow, gentle gestures like stretching her fingers, tapping her feet and undulating her back, she was learning to unlock pent-up muscular tension. She began this work cowered under a table in the corner; by the end of her treatment, she was able to travel across the floor, incorporating moves from her ballet background without triggering the perfectionism and insecurity that once kept her frozen in place. “I was so in my head that I wasn’t listening to the rest of me,” she recalls. “Somatic therapy is the way I got to trust my body.”
Somatic, or body-based, therapy posits that the body is the seat of emotion. Using techniques like breathwork, yoga, dance and bilateral tapping, it aims to process psychic turmoil from what practitioners call the “bottom up.” Cultures around the world have honoured the body’s healing power for millennia (think: tai chi in China and yoga in India, among many traditions), but it’s only recently entered mainstream Western wellness. Recent media coverage has forecast the potential of somatic therapy to treat everything from depression to alcoholism, while on TikTok, videos hashtagged #somaticreleasemassage garner millions of views.
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