What is somatic therapy?

The transformation I witness, in my clients and in myself, is indescribable. Somatic therapy has the power to reshape how we live in our bodies and move through the world in a holistic and evidence-based way.

"Soma" means body in Greek. To put it simply, somatic therapy is therapy that includes the body. It's a bottom-up approach to healing, which means we work with the nervous system and body first. Somatic therapy is much more interested in the felt sense of your experience. This is different from traditional talk therapy, which is top-down. Top-down therapy starts with your thinking brain trying to convince your body that you're safe, even when your nervous system hasn't gotten that message yet.

Somatic work recognizes that trauma, stress, and emotional pain are stored in the body and nervous system, not just in the mind.

The somatic framework is rooted in ancient wisdom that is now backed by modern neuroscience and considered evidence-based. We are returning to a holistic understanding of healing, honoring the mind, body, and spirit as interconnected. This isn't new; it's a return to our roots.

How Somatic Therapy Works

In somatic therapy, we work to re-pattern the way your body has stored your experiences. We learn to move with and through emotions rather than getting stuck in them. We help you build the capacity to sit with your emotions, to hold them in awareness, rather than either being swept away by them or pushing them down beneath you (only so they can return later with a vengeance). We find ways to reconnect with your body and learn to listen to the signals it is constantly sending you. Through this work, we develop a sense of safety in the body again, a felt sense.

Safety cannot be thought, it must be felt.

Here's something important I try to keep in mind: we are only ever living life from the perspective of whatever nervous system state we're in. If your nervous system is dysregulated, anxious, or stuck in protection mode, that's the lens through which you experience everything. You deserve to live in a regulated state, a state where you feel safe within.

Have you ever felt like your body just won't relax? You keep telling yourself, "Everything is okay" and "I am safe," but those pesky physical feelings of anxiety (heart pounding, hot cheeks, heavy breathing, dreaded brain fog) just won't go away. It's as if your body didn't get the memo, which can leave you feeling frustrated. You might have wondered, why is this happening? There are lots of reasons! Learn more about physical symptoms of anxiety here.

The Brain

The amygdala is an almond-shaped part of your brain responsible for setting off alarms to keep you safe. I like to call it the "screaming almond of terror" because it is constantly on alert, always ready to sound the alarm that you are not safe. While the amygdala's goal is to protect you, it can get stuck in overdrive, leaving you perpetually on edge. A hyperactive amygdala also suppresses your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain responsible for rational thinking and decision-making. What I like to call "your good ol' thinking brain." When trauma has taken over, you literally cannot think your way out of the problem because the part of your brain that does rational thinking is offline.

Another crucial area is your insula, which is responsible for your ability to sense what's happening inside your body. The insula is how you feel your heartbeat, your breath, tension, temperature, and hunger. In trauma and anxiety, the insula becomes dysregulated. It either becomes overactive, making you hyperaware of every body sensation in a panicked way, or it shuts down, making you completely disconnected from what your body is trying to tell you. This disconnection from your body signals is a direct result of insula dysregulation.

Your Nervous System

Let me give you a quick rundown about the window of tolerance (Siegel, 1999). Your window of tolerance is the zone where your nervous system feels safe and regulated, your ventral vagal state. It's basically how much stress you can handle. When you are in your window of tolerance, you can usually think clearly, engage in social situations, breathe easier, experience calm, and feel present. It's where most of us want to be, but it feels like we take vacations there rather than live there. If this doesn't resonate with you, consider yourself one of the lucky ones.

Many things negatively impact your window of tolerance: chronic stress, anxiety, trauma, lack of sleep, hormones, hunger, and so much more. When stress, trauma triggers, or overwhelming emotions push you outside that window, your nervous system shifts into either hyperarousal (fight or flight activation) or hypoarousal (freeze or shutdown).

This understanding of how the nervous system operates and shifts between states is grounded in Stephen W. Porges' Polyvagal Theory, which explains how our nervous system scans for safety and threat and organizes our responses accordingly. Our bodies are constantly reading the environment and making split-second decisions about whether we're safe or in danger, often without our conscious awareness.

One of the many goals of somatic work is to widen your window of tolerance so you can handle more stress without tipping into dysregulation. As your window expands, you develop more resilience, more capacity, and more freedom to live the life you want.

What Somatic Therapy Looks Like in Practice

In session, I am highly attuned to my clients and how they are responding to the work we are doing and what they are processing. I notice the patterns showing up in their body, in their breath, posture, movement, and how they're processing. We tune in and get curious about what the body is telling us. As a trauma-informed somatic therapist, we do this at the clients pace. We start where you are. My approach is built on attunement and curiosity, not fixing or forcing.

Depending on what a client's nervous system needs, we might explore reconnecting with body sensations, building body awareness, reconnecting to a sense of comfort and safety, building personalized regulating skills that work for them, pendulation, stress tolerance building, breathwork, movement, body awareness, posture exploration, etc. What we do looks different for each client because healing is deeply personal.

My job is to be present in the room with my clients, to help them notice what's happening in their body, to be curious alongside them, to guide them back to themselves and help them reclaim safety in their body. They're not alone in this process. I'm here to help them remember what it feels like to be at home in their own body.

It is challenging to put into words the impact and transformation I see in my clients' lives through this work, but I hope this blog post offered you some insight into the science behind it and encouraged you to be more curious about healing as a whole - mind, body, and spirit.

If you're interested in somatic therapy, I offer virtual sessions in Georgia, Maine, Texas, Virginia, and Washington. I also offer integrative somatic therapy and movement sessions in-person in Marietta, Georgia (self-pay only).

Book a 15-minute consultation or reach out if you have any questions!

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