What Is Somatic Therapy?

Working Through The Body

We Experience Life Through the Body

We often try to understand ourselves through thought. We examine what happened, why we responded as we did and how we might respond differently in the future. This understanding can be valuable. But we do not experience life through the mind alone. Every emotion, reaction and relationship also involves the body.

Fear can change the breath and tighten the muscles. Anger can create heat and an impulse to act. Anxiety can increase the heart rate and make it difficult to settle. These physical changes can begin before we have consciously understood what is happening. 

This is why understanding does not always create change. You can understand a pattern clearly and still find yourself repeating it.

Including the Body in Therapy 

Somatic therapy is an approach that includes the body in the therapeutic process. Alongside thoughts, emotions and personal history, it pays attention to physical sensation, breath, tension, posture, movement and the impulses that arise within the body. What we notice can offer valuable information. It can reveal patterns that usually remain outside conscious awareness. 

Somatic therapy helps you integrate past experiences that remain active within your system so they no longer shape the present.

How Patterns Become Automatic

The body learns through experience and repetition. If you have repeatedly needed to remain quiet, anticipate difficulty or attend to the needs of others, these ways of responding can become automatic. The reaction can begin before you have consciously assessed what is actually happening in the present moment. 

You might know that it is safe to speak while still feeling your throat tighten. You might understand that a boundary is appropriate while feeling unable to express it. You might know that rest is necessary while your body remains unable to settle. Or you might not even realise that an automatic response has been activated. What you feel and how you act might seem appropriate to what is happening, without you recognising how much they are being shaped by previous experience. 

You can understand a pattern clearly and still find yourself repeating it.

Somatic therapy helps you integrate past experiences that remain active within your system so they no longer shape the present. 

What Happens in a Somatic Therapy Session?

Each session begins with what is present for you. The work unfolds according to what arises and what your system is ready to meet. Emotions, sensations, memories or impulses may emerge, and we work with them in a way that allows the experience to be processed and integrated at the pace that is right for you.

Somatic therapy is a bottom-up approach that creates lasting change in how you feel, relate and move through life. 

If you would like to change the patterns shaping your life, contact me to book a private somatic session. Sessions are available both in person and online.