Natural Processing
Natural Processing is a trauma-focused therapeutic approach that blends somatic (body-based) work with elements of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and gestalt therapy. It's designed to help people effectively process trauma and emotional wounds through the body—not just by talking about them.
Rather than just diving into a painful memory or trying to fix a belief, Natural Processing helps you slow down and follow what’s actually happening in your nervous system. The therapist might help you track sensations, emotions, movements, images, and impulses—all the nonverbal stuff that trauma often gets stored in. For parts of the trauma processing that are particularly difficult for the client to work through, the therapist will use somatic techniques to create more awareness and resilience so that the client can finally work through to resolution what they may have not been able to in previous therapies.
Additionally, Natural Processing helps clients with complex trauma build awareness around their own ‘process’. Essentially what this means is helping clients notice how their feelings, body sensations, movements, thoughts, etc unfold during the trauma processing. Doing this helps the client not only deepen the trauma processing work but also start to intuitively build more awareness of themselves and their relationships.
But even more importantly, process work helps clients notice all the ways they disconnect from or defend against what is distressing them. Examples of this could be feeling the pain of having your feelings or opinion be dismissed by your partner and immediately saying “It’s fine”, which might help you temporarily move away from feeling painful emotions but also prevents you from actually working through them if those emotions are never allowed to be consciously felt.
Clients with complex trauma tend to be very good at disconnecting from their distress because that was needed growing up to survive or keep it together. They get so good at these disconnecting tendencies that they happen automatically and routinely. What is so phenomenal about Natural Processing is that the somatic techniques, combined with the process work and bilateral stimulation from EMDR allows for the therapist to work much more efficiently with the complex trauma client’s defenses so that the underlying trauma can be accessed and healed.
Over time, clients are more easily able to sustain awareness of the distressing emotions without the need to resort to defenses or disconnecting as frequently. This also helps increase their capacity to be with distressing emotions without getting overwhelmed by them. As this capacity grows, so too does their emotional resiliency and progress in healing.
