What is Somatic Trauma Therapy?
Updated: 53 minutes ago
What is somatic therapy and why is it increasingly used in trauma work
Somatic therapy supports emotional wellbeing by working with the body and nervous system as well as with thoughts and feelings. Many people who have experienced trauma find that understanding what happened, while valuable, does not always change how their body responds, because much of trauma is held in patterns of tension, alertness or shutdown that sit below conscious thought.
Over recent decades, the work of people such as Peter Levine, Pat Ogden and Bessel van der Kolk, whose book The Body Keeps the Score brought these ideas to a wide audience, has helped therapists recognise that the body needs to be included in healing. Somatic therapy offers a gentle way to do this, helping the nervous system experience safety in the present so that old survival responses can gradually settle.
"Held within the symptoms of trauma are the very energies, potential and resources necessary for their constructive transformation" Peter Levine
Despite years in therapy, a bookcase filled with half-read books on self-development and a well-earned reputation as a self-help junkie, I still felt stuck, anxious and numb. I was using perfectionism and overworking to keep myself going, alcohol and food to regulate myself and periods of white-knuckling my way through weight loss and fitness regimes in between. I would push myself until I collapsed into burnout, recover just enough to start again and then repeat the cycle, because underneath it all I had never been able to accept myself as I was.
I spent years trying to fix myself from the neck up, believing that if I could only understand my patterns well enough they would finally let go of me. Insight helped, and I would never want to lose it, although the deepest changes in my life began when I started listening to my body as well as my mind.
What does somatic healing mean?
The word somatic comes from the Greek soma, which describes the living body. In somatic work it refers to the body as it is experienced from the inside, which means the body you feel, sense and live in rather than the body you see in the mirror.
Although the word somatics is relatively recent, people have been exploring the connection between the body and emotional life for well over a century. The French psychologist Pierre Janet was writing in the late 1800s about how overwhelming experiences can become split off from awareness and show up in the body. In the 1930s Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud, described how emotions that could not be expressed become held as chronic muscular tension, which he called character armour, and his student Alexander Lowen went on to develop Bioenergetic Analysis. Together they are often seen as the founders of body psychotherapy. Alongside them, body awareness teachers such as F. M. Alexander, Elsa Gindler and Moshe Feldenkrais explored how attention to the body can change how we move and feel.
In the 1950s and 60s the philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin, working with Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago, studied recordings of hundreds of therapy sessions and found that the people who made lasting progress tended to pause and attend to a subtle bodily sense of their situation, which he called the felt sense and later developed into the practice of Focusing. In the 1970s Thomas Hanna, who had trained with Feldenkrais, brought many of these threads together under the name "somatics". Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing, shaped by his observation of how animals in the wild recover from threat, showed how survival responses can remain incomplete in the body and gently resolve when there is enough safety and support, and Pat Ogden's Sensorimotor Psychotherapy brought body awareness further into trauma therapy. In the 1990s Stephen Porges introduced polyvagal theory, which offers a way of understanding how the nervous system constantly senses safety and danger, often well below conscious awareness.
Much of this work also draws, directly or indirectly, on contemplative traditions that have attended to the body for thousands of years.
Somatic healing, then, is healing that includes this inner, felt experience. It recognises that emotions are processed in the body as well as in the mind, and that when we live through stressful or painful experiences, especially in our earliest relationships with parents or caregivers, the impact reaches into our physiology. The nervous system can learn patterns of bracing, numbing or collapse that stay with us long after the original circumstances have passed.
Somatic healing and somatic therapy: what is the difference?
Somatic healing is the wider process of reconnecting with the body and allowing the nervous system to settle into more flexibility and ease. It can happen through many doorways, including meditation, mindful movement, time in nature and the quiet moments in daily life when you notice your breath softening or your shoulders dropping.
Somatic therapy is a structured, relational form of support in which a trained therapist helps you explore this process safely. Because so many of our patterns formed in relationship, having another steady, attuned nervous system alongside you can make it possible to feel things that would be too much to meet alone. In somatic therapy we work from the body upward, noticing sensation, posture and breath, and we also work from the mind downward, exploring with curiosity and compassion the thoughts, beliefs and self-images that formed during earlier experiences. Over time this dialogue between body and mind helps restore a sense of coherence and self-trust.
What is somatic therapy and why does the body matter?
Stress and trauma shape how we breathe, how we hold our muscles, how we digest and how we sleep, because the nervous system expresses itself through the whole body. When it is caught in patterns of defence, it becomes hard to rest, to connect with others or to trust ourselves.
Somatic healing helps you reconnect with your body's cues, recognise patterns of tension, freeze or overwhelm and gently expand your capacity to feel without being swept away. The emphasis rests on resourcing the present, which allows you to respond to life from where you are now rather than from old survival strategies.
Although I came to this work through years in mental health and substance misuse, through my own recovery from addiction and through a meditation practice, for a long time I lived with a kind of disconnection from my body's inner world. We live in a culture that pays great attention to how bodies look and perform while often overlooking the subtle layers of sensation, intuition, memory and emotion that our bodies offer us.
Somatic healing is a way back into that felt inner landscape, and it begins with slowing down enough to listen.
Returning to safety without reliving the past
One of the most relieving things I can share with you is that healing does not require you to go back and relive everything that happened.
Your nervous system needs to have an experience that is new enough, safe enough and real enough for it to begin updating its understanding of what life feels like. The nervous system is constantly making sense of the present through the lens of the past, doing its best to keep you safe based on what it has learned. When that learning happened in environments of chronic stress or relational unpredictability, it can lose some of its natural flexibility, and somatic work gently restores that flexibility by offering presence, safety and room to move.
This is why healing can feel slow and also surprisingly simple. Sometimes it looks like a breath that goes a little deeper, a moment of stillness that no longer feels threatening or a sensation that moves through rather than staying stuck.
Beyond labels: reclaiming your dignity
After more than 25 years in social work, many of them in substance misuse and mental health, I have seen how quickly people come to believe that diagnostic labels such as anxiety, depression or disorder define who they are. A diagnosis can bring clarity and validation, and it can also harden into an identity that leaves little room for change.
What we often call mental health difficulties are, in many cases, the nervous system's intelligent attempts to adapt to a world that did not feel safe. Anxiety can be understood as vigilance, depression as the body conserving energy by shutting down and disconnection as a form of self-protection. When we understand our struggles as adaptations that once helped us survive, we reclaim a sense of dignity, and somatic healing invites us out of pathology and into possibility.
Somatic therapy invites us out of pathology and into possibility.
Signs you might benefit from somatic healing
You do not need to have experienced "big T trauma" to benefit from this work. Many of the people I work with spend much of their lives in their heads, overthinking and analysing, or they feel anxious, frozen or emotionally numb and disconnected from their body and intuition. Some are caught in cycles of people pleasing and burnout, some are sober or in recovery but still feel restless and ungrounded, and others live with chronic pain, an ADHD nervous system or grief that seems to sit in the body. Some are moving through a spiritual awakening and are looking for support that is grounded and unalarmed by what is unfolding.
These experiences are often signs that your nervous system is protecting you with patterns it learned long ago. As that understanding moves from an idea into something you can feel in your body, self-compassion tends to arise quite naturally.
Where touch comes in: NeuroAffective Touch®
Much of what the body holds began before we had words for it, in the earliest relationships where we learned what was safe and what was not. For this reason, some of it is hard to reach through conversation alone.
My 1:1 work is rooted in NeuroAffective Touch® (NATouch), a body-centred psychotherapy developed by Dr Aline LaPierre, in which I have completed foundation training. NATouch brings together gentle, attuned touch with verbal reflection and somatic awareness, and it draws on polyvagal theory, attachment research and affective neuroscience. You remain fully clothed throughout, touch is always light and intentional, and nothing happens without your consent and guidance. Sessions may also include warm heated pillows, blankets or weighted cushions, which can be offered alongside touch or as a gentle preparation for it.
The purpose of this touch is to offer a felt experience of attunement and safety, so that early patterns of protection and bracing can slowly renegotiate themselves. In NATouch we often speak of moving from the felt sense, the bodily sensations Gendlin described, towards a felt self, which is a more integrated and embodied sense of who you are.
What happens in a somatic therapy session?
No two sessions are the same, because no two people are the same and each day brings something new even within you. Every session is a co-creation guided by what is present in the moment and by what feels safe and meaningful for your system.
We begin with a check-in, and from there the session may unfold through breath awareness, grounding, tracking sensation or, where you would like it, attuned touch. We may explore emotions, beliefs and inner dialogues as they surface, meeting them with curiosity and compassion. My training shapes the work, and I also follow a quieter kind of listening that is guided by presence as much as by planning, since the intelligence we are tuning into lives within you.
One client (whose details have been changed) came to me feeling constantly on edge. She was highly capable at work, yet inside she felt as though she was always bracing for something to go wrong. As we gently tracked her sensations, she noticed a tight band across her chest that she realised had been there for as long as she could remember. We did not try to get rid of it, and instead we brought slow, supported awareness to it. As she stayed with the sensation it shifted into warmth and then into a wave of emotion, her breath deepened and tears came, and afterwards she described a sense of space and softening that she had not felt in years.
This is what it can look like when the body is allowed to complete a stress response at its own pace. You are never pushed or rushed, and consent and co-regulation sit at the heart of everything we do.
Explore more about 1:1 Somatic Therapy sessions here.
Listening to the body's language
In this work we are learning to listen to the subtle language of the body, to the impulses beneath thought and to a kind of knowing that does not always speak in words. As we slow down, we begin to sense where energy flows and where it holds, and what wants to be met, expressed or softened.
Sometimes this shows up as a pattern of tension easing after years of holding, and sometimes it is the emergence of a knowing that was buried beneath habit or fear. We give this unfolding the time it needs, with respect for your own pace.
What can change over time
As your body begins to feel safer, change tends to arrive gradually and quietly. People often find that they notice their needs and respond to them with more care, that emotions move through more easily and that boundaries become possible without so much guilt. Many begin to trust their gut feelings again, to rest or meditate with more ease and to find small moments of pleasure and stillness in the body, and they often describe feeling calmer, live life with more connection and ease and more like themselves.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it” Rumi
Frequently asked questions
Is somatic healing the same as massage or bodywork?
Somatic therapy is a form of psychotherapy rather than massage. Where touch is used, as in NeuroAffective Touch®, it is light, fully clothed and offered in conversation with what you are noticing, with the aim of supporting safety and emotional integration rather than working on the muscles.
Do I need to have experienced trauma to benefit?
Many people come to somatic work because of anxiety, burnout, chronic tension or a sense of disconnection, without identifying with the word trauma at all. The work meets you wherever you are and follows what your nervous system is ready for.
How long does somatic healing take?
There is no fixed timeline, since patterns that formed over many years usually soften gradually. Some people notice small shifts early on, such as sleeping better or feeling less on edge, and deeper changes tend to unfold over months. My 10-session bundle, used over six months, is designed to give this process the steady rhythm it needs to get started.
A gentle path forward
What most of us need is safety, presence and space to feel, and somatic healing offers a path back to your body, your truth and your inner guidance.
If something in this post has felt familiar and you are curious about what it might be like to explore it with support, I would love to hear from you. You can book a free connection call, which is simply a relaxed conversation about what you are experiencing and whether working together feels right for you, with no pressure either way.
If you would rather explore at your own pace, the Sunday Pause is a gentle weekly email with a moment of reflection and a short practice to help your nervous system soften and reconnect. You are warmly welcome to sign up using this form below.
About the author
Laura Starky is an integrative somatic therapist based in Beverley, East Yorkshire, offering sessions in person and online. Her path into this work began in pre-hospital emergency care and continued through 25 years in social work across child protection, substance misuse and mental health. Her somatic training began with ISOHH and has since deepened through NeuroAffective Touch® training with Dr Aline LaPierre. She holds ACCPH Senior Member accreditation and works under regular professional supervision. Laura is also a qualified yoga and meditation teacher and a committed practitioner of contemplative practice, rooted mainly in the non-dual tradition of Shaiva Tantra.
Sources and further reading
Gendlin, E. T. (1978) Focusing. New York: Bantam Books.
You can learn more about Focusing through the International Focusing Institute at focusing.org.
Levine, P. A. (1997) Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
More about Somatic Experiencing is available through Somatic Experiencing International at traumahealing.org.
Porges, S. W. (2011) The Polyvagal Theory. New York: W. W. Norton.
Hanna, T. (1988) Somatics: Reawakening the Mind's Control of Movement, Flexibility and Health. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
More about NeuroAffective Touch® is available at neuroaffectivetouch.com.
Last updated: September 2026
