The Art of Noticing | An Interview with Body-based Psychotherapist, Matilda Tonkin Wells | by Lainee Kirk

When you are facing anxiety, you do not simply battle anxious thoughts. With the anxious thoughts, your palms start to sweat, your fingers shake, and your breathing becomes shallow – it is a full-body experience.

Somatic is a term which refers to the body rather than the mind and spirit. Somatic psychotherapy is a body-oriented therapy which practices awareness and embodiment of internal workings. Though the body is usually thought of as separate from the mind and spirit, Matilda’s work does not distinguish between the two.

Matilda Tonkin Wells is trained in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and nowadays calls herself a body-based therapist as she combines training in trauma-informed and somatic practices alongside dance and movement.

“We are constantly in a somatic experience because we are embodied beings,” Matilda said. “How I work within a therapy session is to start to build an awareness of these things more consciously.”

At its core, body-based therapy is reconnecting with the body. This can be done through simply noticing, or finding movements that reflect the body’s expression.

“Imagine it is almost like somebody going out and painting a landscape as a way of nourishing themselves,” Matilda said. “I like to think of it as going out and dancing a landscape.”

After an accident that restricted the movement of her arm for one and a half years, Matilda was forced to adjust to life with limited movement.

“I started to notice the embodied nature of mind,” Matilda said. “I was feeling impacted by that trauma in ways that weren’t just to do with the pain.”

Before the injury, Matilda worked with a group aiding migrant women seeking asylum. In that space, she saw the healing effects that dancing together had on the women. These experiences influence the approach of integrating an embodied sense of mind into her work.

As children, we are very good at noticing the body. There is an immediacy in response to the somatic experience that starts to diminish in adulthood.

 “It comes back to very early pre-verbal ways of relating, we relate through nonverbal cues,” Matilda said. “Even though we think of ourselves as being quite wordy creatures, actually a lot of the information that we gather about others is happening nonverbally.”

For people with traumatic experiences, the body can feel like a place of danger. It is distressing to sit with the feelings that arise, leading them to disassociation or numbness. Matilda’s work attempts to build up a tolerance for these challenging feelings so that patients can experience them more comfortably.

Clients come to Matilda seeking to bring their embodied experience into the therapy. Others wish to find an alternative way to express things they cannot with words.

Throughout sessions, Matilda asks clients how they are feeling and how that is felt in the body. She encourages clients to make a habit of asking themselves this, not just in sessions but in daily life especially. The practice of noticing bodily feelings can prepare you to regulate when a difficult feeling arises.

“If you feel happy, how do you know you feel happy?” Matilda said. “What’s the sensation of happiness? What’s the somatic experience of happiness?”

When Matilda asks clients to notice what is happening in their body, they often bring up bodily sensations such as shallow breathing or increased heartbeat. Sometimes, imagery can arise during the practice like one of Matilda’s clients who describes a white light that moves through her core.

 “Traditional psychology and talk therapy are dealing with things that are very much happening in the body,” Matilda said. “An embodied approach brings that noticing of the somatic experience to the forefront.” 

There are no expectations on what the movements must look like or the level of your mobility when going into body-based therapy. Each movement, whether it is the raise of a finger or swooping of an arm, is an expression of something.

“Everybody’s a dancer. If you’ve got a body, then you’re a dancer,” Matilda said.