Dating With Your Whole Self: Mind, Body, and Soul

The Short Version: This is what dating with your whole self looks like. We spoke with somatic practitioner Maryanne Comaroto, PhD, about somatic therapy, what the body knows, and how a mind-body connection you’ve practiced well can lift your dating life.

Several times a day, I catch myself running on autopilot. Whether I’m doing the dishes, driving to the grocery store, or taking out the trash, autopilot tends to kick in whenever a task is routine and my mind starts to drift from what’s in front of me.

My hands might be in the dishwater while my head runs through everything I need to finish that day. I’m heading to the store, yet my mind is on a friend I’ve drifted away from and on how I seriously have to call my grandma more often.

Busy people often end up on autopilot. Stay there too long, though, and one crucial connection takes a hit: the link between our minds and our bodies.

On autopilot, our bodies are disconnected, and our minds stop actively engaging with them. When the job is washing dishes or taking out the trash, that can be harmless.

But once that disconnect spreads into other parts of our lives, such as our relationships with other people and with ourselves, it often becomes impossible to ignore, and harmful.

The mind-body connection is vital when you’re dating.

Maryanne Comaroto, PhD, is an author, a relationship activist, and a somatic practitioner. She told us how the principles and methods of somatic therapy can give singles useful tools for dating with intention.

“Somatic work is about employing the agency that’s available inside your being– your body, mind, and soul,” Maryanne said. “Each person has an intuition, a wisdom that lies inside their body.”

Therapy That Sees All of You

Maryanne got her start as a counselor for chemical dependency, and she told us she’s never looked back. Over her years in the field, she began looking into how therapeutic approaches work and how they deal with emotional challenges.

“I became passionately interested in moving away from the theoretical or analytical aspects of understanding how we thrive,” Maryanne said. “Because when we don’t embody the kind of information we get in therapy, we’ll be in the same patterns.”

Somatic practitioners differ in how they approach therapy, just as practitioners of other modalities, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or talk therapy, do.

Somatic therapy pays attention to what the body knows.

According to Maryanne, these approaches have helped many people, but they don’t bring the body in the way somatic therapy does.

“The body is involved always, even in these analytic and psychological approaches,” Maryanne told us. “But there wasn’t an emphasis on it like there is now. Somatic work is about employing the agency that’s available inside your being– your body, mind, soul.”

Where other approaches aim to change thoughts or behavior, somatic therapy looks at the whole self. It draws on what the body already knows and has lived through.

“It’s not necessarily a mechanical approach,” Maryanne said. “It’s a body-based approach to understanding your experience. It doesn’t count out all the other ways of understanding. It’s a more holistic approach.”

Somatic Therapy Draws On the Body’s Wisdom

Somatic therapy looks a little different from traditional therapy, though the two have plenty in common.

“Let’s say you were in a session with me, and you’re talking about something,” Maryanne said. “You would start by giving me the narrative about that, and then we would talk about how that felt.”

If you’ve tried other forms of therapy, this sequence will probably ring a bell. Maryanne said the somatic work starts once a client has laid out the story and put into words how they feel about it.

After a client shares their feelings, a somatic practitioner might pause and ask where in the body they notice those sensations. Practitioners help clients tie what they think and feel mentally to the physical emotions that come along with it.

Somatic therapy helps people link what they sense in their minds and bodies.

Somatic therapists help patients find how body and mind are linked, then guide them as they explore that link. Tuning in to and caring for the mind-body connection can be deeply therapeutic, and it can also change a person’s dating life.

“Somatic work is empowering,” Maryanne said. “Usually, we just climb over what we know and feel, and we go up into the head and do the things we think we should. In dating, knowing what’s already within you and being able to speak the language of your own body is huge.”

In dating, a solid link between mind and body can look like a clear sense of what you want, and of what you don’t.

“So many times, I hear people say, ‘I knew he wasn’t the right person for me,’ or ‘I knew I shouldn’t have done that,’” Maryanne said. “But they felt it and didn’t pay attention.”

When mind, body, and soul are strongly connected, people can trust themselves on a deeper level. They’re able to listen to themselves and to the wisdom their bodies offer.

For Empowered Dating, Trust Your Knowing

Somatic therapy tries to surface a knowing that plenty of us have felt. When the body tries to communicate what it knows, you might call it a gut instinct. According to Maryanne, trusting what your body knows while dating can spare you needless bad experiences and heartbreak.

“Some people’s gut instinct is in their heart, or it comes through this really soft knowing,” Maryanne said. “There are so many different ways people experience their knowing. It’s about getting back and aligning with that knowing so we can use it.”

Tuning in to what the body knows helps singles approach dating with intention and a sense of empowerment. Once people connect with the way their bodies know things and express that knowledge, they learn to trust themselves on a deeper level and feel surer of themselves while dating.

Trust yourself at every stage of dating.

Trusting your gut matters in dating, particularly when a relationship is still new. Uncertainty or trepidation about someone or a relationship in those early days rarely comes out of nowhere.

It may be your body’s signal that something about this person or relationship feels like what you’ve been through before, which maybe didn’t end well. In somatic therapy, patients are encouraged to explore their gut feelings and figure out what those feelings are trying to say.

Anxiety can make trusting your gut harder, which raises the question: “Is that my gut instinct – or is it anxiety?”

“Some anxiety is good anxiety, and it can tell us about our healthy fears and what to avoid,” Maryanne said. “Sometimes you might be anxious for good reason.”

There’s also closed-loop anxiety to contend with. “Closed-loop is the anxiety that’s going to say the same thing over and over. The neural network says the same thing no matter what.” It’s still out to shield us from something, but it has gone haywire and can leave us stuck in a loop of uncertainty.

Somatic therapy does more than connect mind, body, and soul: it trains the whole self to listen to what it’s saying, to hear it, and to trust it.

“Trust in oneself is critical,” Maryanne said. “I’ve seen through somatic therapy that there is a path to becoming whole again, and it works like nothing I’ve ever seen.”