What is Somatic Therapy?

What Is Somatic Therapy?

Somatic therapy is a body-based approach to psychotherapy that focuses on direct, present-moment experience.

Rather than working only with thoughts, beliefs, or narratives, we ALSO continuously pay attention to:

Physical sensations
Breath patterns
Nervous system activation
Muscle tension and posture
Subtle impulses and emotional energy
The felt sense of what is happening right now

The term felt sense, refers to the pre-verbal bodily knowing that precedes clear emotion or thought.

Every emotion begins in the body.

Fear is not just a concept — it is activation, trembling, alertness.
Shame is not just a word — it is contraction, heat, collapse.
Anger is not just a story — it is energy, pressure, intensity.

Without contact with these sensations, emotional work often remains intellectual.

Somatic therapy restores the connection between insight and lived experience.

Why the Body Is Essential in Healing?

Modern psychology and neuroscience show that overwhelming or unresolved experiences — especially from early life — are stored in the nervous system.

Not just as memories.
But as patterns.

Patterns of:

Hypervigilance
Shutdown
Dissociation
People-pleasing
Freezing in conflict
Chronic anxiety
Emotional numbness

These are not personality flaws.

They are intelligent adaptations.

As long as these patterns live only in the unconscious layers of our experience, they continue shaping relationships, work dynamics, and self-image — often without being recognized.

Cognitive insight alone does not always change them.

The body must be included.

By tapping into the felt sense and bringing an attuned awareness to our inner experience, we can uncover the messages our unconscious is sending us. All the information required for healing is already present within—we simply need to learn how to listen to it and interpret it. Through this learning process, we build a vital bridge between the mind and the body.

Function of Avoidance

If we look closely, many activities in modern life serve one significant function:

Not to feel.

This can look like:

Doom scrolling
Overworking
Compulsive self-improvement
Addictions
Overthinking and rumination
Chronic tiredness
Dissociation
Even certain forms of spirituality

We keep ourselves busy or loop through familiar patterns of thought and energy, yet we rarely reach the underlying layer that actually drives this activity.

Avoidance is not weakness. It is an adaptation.

It is a strategy of the nervous system and mind, activated when something feels too uncomfortable to feel directly. And in somatic therapy, we focus on regaining the capacity to feel again. As a result, maintaining strategies of not feeling becomes less and less necessary. We develop:

Capacity to stay present.
Capacity to feel without collapsing.

Capacity to feel compassion for our strategies.
Capacity to remain with intensity without being overwhelmed.

You could say we grow emotional muscles built of 'presence' tissue.

Somatic Therapy and Developmental Trauma

No one had perfectly attuned caregivers all the time.

Every human being experienced relational disruptions in childhood. When these disruptions are not processed, they become embodied patterns.

They may show up as:

Low self-esteem
Shame or a sense of “something is wrong with me.”
Fear of abandonment or deep loneliness
Jealousy in relationships
Difficulty setting boundaries
Freezing when someone raises their voice
Feeling unworthy of love
Not knowing what we truly want

These are often signs of developmental trauma — subtle or sometimes dramatic early experiences that shaped the nervous system and self-image.

In our online somatic therapy sessions, we gently explore these origins.

Not to blame parents.
Not to get rid of the disturbing experience.

But to bring compassionate awareness to what was once overwhelming — and allow the body to complete what could not be completed then, and to embrace suppressed parts.

Without bodily integration, exploring the past can remain conceptual.

With embodied presence, deep transformation becomes possible.