What is Somatic psychotherapy?
Somatic psychotherapy is a type of therapy that helps you work through emotional or mental struggles by also paying attention to what's happening in your body. Sometimes, our bodies hold onto stress, trauma, or emotions, even if we’re not aware of it. In somatic therapy, we don’t just talk — we also notice things like breathing, muscle tension, or posture. By tuning into and working with those body signals and sensations, we can help release stuck emotions and behavioral patterns, reduce anxiety, feel more balanced, make clearer decisions, communicate more effectively, take care of yourself and other with more ease and many other benefits!
When incorporating somatic therapy and talk therapy, we will still talk, process, and gain insight into your behaviors and relationships. But we’ll also include your body’s experience when processing through different topics. The integration of talk therapy and somatic therapy allows for more holistic and sustainable healing.
Somatic psychotherapy allows for long term healing because it focuses on the nervous system in the healing process.
When we go through stress, trauma, or overwhelming experiences, our nervous system does its best to protect us and can get stuck in survival states — like fight, flight, freeze, or collapse.
Even after the threat is gone, the body can still hold onto those patterns: feeling tense for no reason, jumpy, floaty/disconnected, or even numb. That’s your nervous system doing its best to protect you — but it may not realize it’s safe now.
Somatic therapy helps by gently guiding your body to complete those stuck survival responses — through breath, movement, sensation awareness, grounding, and regulation techniques. Somatic therapy isn’t about It’s not about reliving trauma or learning how to be perfectly regulated all the time. Somatic therapy is about learning how to feel and release those stuck emotions, energies, and experiences slowly and safely, so as to find more ease and peace in your day to day.