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What is Somatic Therapy?

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Somatic Therapy for Nervous System Healing, Trauma and Embodied Integration

Somatic therapy is a body-based approach to healing that works with the nervous system directly, gently and relationally. Rather than focusing solely on thoughts, beliefs or behaviour, it addresses how the body stores and processes stress, trauma and the patterns formed through early relational experience. Many of the ways we learned to survive, whether that was staying vigilant, shutting down, over-giving or disconnecting from feeling, began long before we had words for them. They were shaped by the relationships and environments we grew up in, by what felt safe and what did not. Somatic therapy works at that level, not by analysing the past but by creating the conditions in the present for something different to become possible.  This work is polyvagal-informed, which means it understands safety and connection not as abstract ideals but as genuine biological needs. The nervous system does not heal through effort or insight alone. It heals through experience, through the slow, repeated sense that it is safe enough to soften, to feel and to reconnect.

My Work Supports People Who

Feel emotionally disconnected, numb or flat, even when life looks fine on the outside. Carry anxiety, chronic tension or a sense of overwhelm that doesn't seem to shift regardless of what they try. Experience functional freeze, a state of being stuck despite doing all the right things. Live with the effects of developmental or relational trauma, attachment wounds or early experiences that shaped how safe the world has felt to be in.

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It also supports those who identify as neurodivergent and are seeking a nervous system-aware approach that works with how they are wired rather than against it. Those navigating spiritual awakening, psychedelic experiences, periods of existential intensity or the disorientation that can follow significant inner shifts, where what is needed is not interpretation but grounding, presence and embodied integration.

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This work recognises that change does not come from forcing yourself to be different. It comes from creating the right conditions for connection to reawaken, and from meeting what is here now so that new experiences of safety, belonging and self-trust can gradually emerge.

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How Somatic Therapy Works

Your nervous system responds moment-to-moment to your environment, relationships, breath, movement and internal sensations. When you’ve lived with overwhelm, stress, relational wounding or chronic survival patterns, your nervous system holds that experience in the body, not just your mind. This isn't about fixing you. It's about teaching your nervous system that it can soften, regulate and return to an embodied experience of life. In somatic therapy, we work with:

Who Can Benefit from Somatic Therapy?

Somatic therapy tends to be a good fit for people who sense that something lives in the body that talking alone hasn't quite reached. Perhaps conventional therapy has offered real insight but the nervous system responses, the tightening, the shutting down, the hypervigilance, remain. Perhaps mindfulness or meditation has felt inaccessible, overwhelming or has stirred something without offering a way through.

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This approach works particularly well for people who have lived with relational trauma or unresolved attachment patterns, high sensitivity or a neurodivergent nervous system, functional freeze or shutdown, chronic anxiety or panic responses and the kind of exhaustion that comes from years of working hard to hold everything together.

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It also offers a considered space for those whose inner life has expanded in ways that feel difficult to integrate, whether through spiritual emergence, energetic sensitivity or periods of psychological intensity that have left them seeking steadiness rather than more activation.

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If your nervous system learned survival before it learned safety, this work offers a gentle, relational path toward something different. Not through pressure or bypassing, but through presence, patience and the experience of being genuinely met.

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What to Expect in a Somatic Therapy Session

Sessions are available online and in person. Whichever way we meet, the quality of presence and the pace of the work remain the same.

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A somatic therapy session can feel quite different from conventional talking therapy. There may be less emphasis on narrating your history and more on noticing what is happening in your body right now. We might explore breath, sensation, temperature, movement or tension. We might track the subtle shifts that happen when something is touched on, or simply rest in the experience of being present without needing to produce anything.

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There is no fixed structure and no agenda imposed from outside. I follow your lead. What arises in the session guides where we go, and nothing is rushed or pushed toward a particular outcome.

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One of the things that makes somatic therapy distinct is that the relationship itself is part of the healing. For many people, early experiences of feeling unsafe, unseen or alone in difficulty happened within relationships. Part of what this work offers is the experience of being genuinely met, at the pace your nervous system needs, without conditions. That experience of felt safety in connection is central to the support. 

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You remain in control throughout. The emphasis is always on your felt sense of safety, your capacity in any given moment and the gradual building of trust, both in the process and in yourself.

Somatic Therapy with Laura

I bring together lived experience, nervous system education and body-first practice to support you in reconnecting with what you already carry within you. This work invites curiosity and compassion toward the body rather than force or judgement, and it moves at the pace that feels right for you.

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Over time, clients often notice that the body begins to feel less like something to manage and more like somewhere to inhabit. Tension and anxiety that once felt constant begin to soften. Emotions that were difficult to access or name become more available. The pull toward survival responses, the bracing, the shutting down, the relentless striving, gradually loosens its grip.

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What tends to grow in its place is something quieter and more lasting. A greater sense of internal safety. More ease in relationships. A clearer connection to intuition and to what genuinely feels true. The capacity to be present with yourself and others without it costing so much.

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This is not about arriving at a fixed destination or resolving everything. It is about building a different relationship with your own experience, one that has more space, more choice and more ground beneath it.

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Working Directly with the Body

For some people, something remains that words haven't quite reached, because the patterns that developed earliest in life were laid down before language existed. They live in the body's survival responses — the tensing of fight, the urge to flee, the stillness of freeze, the collapse of submission and the desperate reach of the attachment cry. These are the body's own form of intelligence, shaped by what it learned in order to survive.

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Part of what this work offers is a way of meeting those patterns at the level where they actually live. Rather than trying to talk the body out of its responses, we become curious about them. What does the body do when something feels like too much? Where does it tense, withdraw or go still? What happens when that is met with presence rather than pressure?

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Where appropriate, and always with consent and within an established therapeutic relationship, this work may include NeuroAffective Touch, a relationally-informed somatic approach developed by Dr Aline LaPierre that works directly with the nervous system through gentle, attuned contact. It offers the body a different kind of experience, one of being met rather than managed, that can reach what reflection alone sometimes cannot.

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This doesn't arise for everyone, and there is no expectation that it will. It emerges gradually, when the relationship feels ready and when the body itself begins to signal that a different quality of contact might be welcome.

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“Laura was a revelation. For the first time I learned how to truly recognise the patterns in my body and what it feels like to be deeply relaxed.”

Sally

The primary, ancient symbol for breath is the Sanskrit character Om (ॐ) or Prana, representing life force, consciousness

Dive Deeper with Me

A Free Pre-Recorded Workshop + Guide 

The 5-Step Micro Pause

Feeling ungrounded on your healing journey? Reconnect with the life force in 5 simple steps

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