What is somatic therapy? How body based healing works
If you have ever left a therapy session thinking, "I understand my problems perfectly and I still feel awful," this post is for you.
That gap between knowing and feeling is exactly the gap somatic therapy is built to close.
The short answer
Somatic therapy is a form of counseling that works with your body, not just your thoughts. "Soma" simply means body. Instead of only talking about what happened to you, we pay attention to how your experiences live in you right now.
The tight chest before a difficult conversation, the jaw that never unclenches, the fog that rolls in when someone raises their voice: those physical patterns are not random. They are your nervous system's record of what it took to survive. Somatic therapy helps that record update.
Why talking is sometimes not enough
Here is something many people are never told: trauma and chronic stress are stored in the parts of your brain and body that language does not reach very well.
When something overwhelming happens, your survival brain takes over. It does not file the experience away as a tidy story. It stores it as sensation, impulse, and alarm: a racing heart, a held breath, an urge to run or freeze or please. Later, long after the event, your body can keep reacting as if it is still happening.
This is why you can be brilliant at explaining your childhood and still flinch at a certain tone of voice. Insight lives upstairs. The alarm lives downstairs. Somatic therapy goes downstairs.
What we actually do in a somatic session
Every therapist works a little differently. In my practice, sessions weave together conversation and gentle body awareness. It can look like this:
You are telling me about a hard week, and I invite you to pause. Where do you feel that in your body? Maybe you notice heat in your chest, or a hollow feeling in your belly. We stay with it briefly, with grounding tools to keep you steady. Often something moves: a deeper breath arrives, tears come, a memory makes new sense. Then we talk about what shifted and how to carry it into your week.
Some sessions include simple breathing practices or gentle movement drawn from my decade of teaching trauma informed yoga and mindfulness. Everything is invitational. You never have to close your eyes, do a pose, or go anywhere near a memory before you are ready.
What somatic therapy can help with
People often seek out somatic work for trauma and complex PTSD, anxiety that lives in the body, grief, burnout, and big life transitions. It tends to resonate with people who feel stuck in patterns they can describe perfectly but cannot seem to change, and with those who feel disconnected or numb and want to feel like themselves again.
It is not magic and it is not instant. It is a steady retraining of your nervous system through experiences of safety, repeated until your body believes them.
Is it evidence informed?
Body oriented approaches to trauma have grown enormously over the past two decades, alongside research on how the nervous system responds to overwhelming experiences. My own work draws from somatic approaches, mindfulness based practices, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, blended to fit each person. If you are curious about the science, books like Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score are a popular starting place.
What a first step could look like
If this way of working speaks to you, I offer a free 15 minute video consultation. You can ask anything, share as much or as little as you like, and get a feel for whether we fit. I see adults online across Florida from my home base in Orlando.
Related reading: How to Calm Your Nervous System After Trauma | How I work