what is somatic therapy? (why your body holds more than you think)

Most of us were taught to think of mental health as a mind problem. Talk about it, understand it, think your way to a different perspective. And insight is genuinely useful — understanding where a pattern comes from can be meaningful. But for a lot of people, especially those dealing with trauma or chronic stress, insight alone doesn't shift things as much as we'd like it to.

That's because the part of your brain that stores trauma and stress responses isn't the part that processes language and logic. Your nervous system is doing a lot of work below the level of conscious thought. Somatic therapy works with that.

what "somatic" actually means

Somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning body. Somatic therapy is any therapeutic approach that intentionally works with the body as part of the healing process — not just the thinking mind, but physical sensation, breath, posture, movement, and the way your nervous system responds to stress and safety.

It's not yoga. It's not breathwork as a standalone practice. It's therapy that uses body awareness as information. Where do you notice tension when you think about that relationship? What happens in your chest when you talk about that event? When you imagine feeling safe, what shifts in your physical experience? These aren't rhetorical questions. They're entry points into parts of your experience that don't have words yet.

why the body matters for trauma

Trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk put it plainly: the body keeps the score. Traumatic experiences aren't stored the way ordinary memories are. They're stored as physical states — a braced chest, a held breath, a startle response, a gut that clenches before your mind even registers what triggered it.

This is why you can fully understand, cognitively, that something is over — that the dangerous relationship is in the past, that you're safe now — and still have your body respond as though it isn't. Your nervous system learned something during that experience, and it hasn't gotten the memo that things have changed. You can't think your way out of a nervous system pattern. You have to work with the nervous system directly.

That's what somatic work is for.

what somatic work looks like in sessions

A lot of people picture somatic therapy as involving movement, touch, or breathwork — and some modalities do involve those things. But in a virtual therapy context, somatic work looks more like developing body awareness and working with what you notice.

It might look like slowing down to notice what's happening in your body when we're talking about something difficult. Naming a sensation — tightness in the throat, heaviness in the chest, a kind of restlessness in the legs — without immediately trying to explain or fix it. Getting curious about what that sensation is carrying.

It might look like grounding practices that orient your nervous system to the present moment. Or noticing when your body braces or collapses as you approach a topic, and working gently with the protective instinct that's showing up rather than pushing through it.

A lot of it is resourcing — building embodied experiences of safety and steadiness that your nervous system can actually draw on when things get hard. The goal is to expand your window of tolerance: the range of emotional experience you can be with without needing to shut down or overflow.

somatic work and EMDR

I integrate somatic awareness into almost everything I do, and it's especially central when I'm using EMDR. EMDR works directly with the nervous system's stored trauma responses, and being able to track body sensations alongside thoughts and emotions is a core part of how it works. The two approaches are deeply complementary.

If you've tried EMDR before and found it overwhelming, somatic resourcing — building your capacity for nervous system regulation first — is often the missing piece.

who somatic therapy is helpful for

Somatic work can be useful for anyone, but it tends to be especially valuable for:

• People who feel "stuck" even after a lot of talk therapy — who have insight but not relief
• Trauma survivors, including people with complex or developmental trauma
• People with anxiety that lives primarily in their body — chronic tension, GI issues, a nervous system that won't settle
• People who find it hard to access or name emotions verbally
• People dealing with depression, particularly the disconnected or numb aspects
• Neurodivergent folks who experience the world with heightened sensory intensity
• People who have spent years intellectualizing their experience and are ready to try something different

you don't have to have it figured out

Somatic work doesn't require any particular background or self-awareness. You don't have to know what you're feeling or be good at talking about your body. We build that together, slowly. Most people are surprised by what their body has been quietly carrying once they start paying attention to it — but that process doesn't have to be overwhelming. We go at your pace.