You are sitting across from your therapist in a somatic therapy session, explaining that the argument really was not that big of a deal. You are fine. Really. Except somewhere between explaining how fine you are and recounting what happened, your shoulders have crept toward your ears. You clasp your hands tightly in your lap, and your breathing has changed. When your therapist asks what you wanted to say in the moment, your stomach tightens and you immediately answer, “Nothing.”
Your therapist pauses. Maybe they notice that something shifted when you said that and ask whether you noticed it too. Perhaps you did. Perhaps you have absolutely no idea what they are talking about because, as far as you are concerned, you were simply sitting in a chair discussing Tuesday. Both possibilities are welcome.
In some ways, your therapist may be listening to more than one story at once. There is the story you are telling through words: the argument was not a big deal, you are over it, everything is fine. Then there is another story unfolding through your breath, posture, movement, sensation, pauses, expression, and whatever happened in your stomach when you imagined saying what you actually wanted to say. Neither story is automatically more truthful than the other. Together, however, they may give us more of you.
This is one of the places where somatic work can enter therapy.
The word somatic refers to the body, but somatic therapy is not about treating the body as a secret oracle that always knows something your conscious mind does not. Somatic therapy also extends far beyond breathing exercises, grounding techniques, trauma treatment, or a therapist repeatedly asking where you feel something in your body until you begin reconsidering every decision that led you to this particular couch.
Somatic work can be much broader than that. At its heart, it recognizes that we experience our lives through bodies as well as thoughts, emotions, memories, relationships, behaviors, identities, imagination, and stories. Our bodies have been part of the conversation all along. Somatic therapy simply gives us another way to listen.
What Is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy is an umbrella term that encompasses therapeutic approaches intentionally incorporating bodily experience alongside thoughts, emotions, memories, behaviors, relationships, and meaning. In therapy, somatic awareness might involve noticing breathing, muscle tension, temperature, heartbeat, posture, movement, sensory experiences, energy, pressure, heaviness, restlessness, numbness, or an impulse to move closer, pull away, hide, push, pace, stretch, curl inward, or become very still.
Sometimes those experiences are obvious. Other times, changes in the body are much quieter. Perhaps you notice that your voice becomes softer whenever you talk about a particular person, or you lean forward when you begin taking responsibility for someone else’s feelings. Maybe your breathing changes when conflict begins, you become sleepy when a conversation feels overwhelming, or you notice your leg bouncing beneath the chair while you are trying very hard to appear calm.
None of these responses automatically means anything, and that distinction matters. A tight chest does not come with a tiny psychological label attached to it, nor does a bouncing leg, a clenched jaw, or an urge to leave the room. Somatic therapy is less interested in assigning universal meanings to bodily experiences and more interested in becoming curious about what those experiences mean for you, if they mean anything at all.
The Body Can Be Woven Into Many Kinds of Therapy
Therapists can integrate somatic work into many different forms of psychotherapy. A therapist may incorporate bodily awareness while using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Internal Family Systems (IFS) or other parts-based approaches, EMDR, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), relationship therapy, mindfulness-based approaches, psychodynamic therapy, Jungian and other depth-oriented approaches, or other modalities. Somatic work, in other words, can be something a therapist uses rather than simply a kind of therapy someone does.
Because somatic therapy is an umbrella term rather than one standardized treatment, the amount and quality of research varies considerably depending on the specific approach, technique, and clinical concern a therapist is addressing. Some body-oriented interventions have been studied more extensively than others, and incorporating somatic awareness into psychotherapy is not the same as claiming that every approach described as somatic has the same evidence base.
At Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness, we tend to think about therapy in this more integrative way. Human beings rarely arrive neatly divided into cognitive problems, relationship problems, nervous-system problems, sensory problems, existential questions, symbolic experiences, or stories from the past. We bring the whole tangled, fascinating bundle through the door. Good therapy has room for all of it.
The Art and Science of Somatic Therapy
Therapy lives in an interesting place between art and science. The science gives us ways of understanding cognition, emotion, learning, behavior, sensory processing, interoception, relationships, physiology, and the ongoing communication between brain and body. Yet therapy does not happen to a theoretical human. It happens between actual people, and that is where the art begins.
Two people can experience tightness in their chests for entirely different reasons. Silence can mean reflection for one person and fear for another. Movement may reflect agitation, concentration, excitement, sensory regulation, discomfort, or simply a body that prefers not to sit still. A therapist brings psychological knowledge into the room, while the client brings something equally important: lived experience. Therapy happens where those things meet.
Somatic therapy can be especially useful because it allows us to move between what clinicians often call top-down and bottom-up approaches. These terms can sound more complicated than they need to be. Essentially, they give us language for different places from which we might enter an experience. They are useful clinical shorthand rather than two completely separate systems, since thought, emotion, sensation, attention, memory, behavior, and physiology continuously influence one another.
Top-Down Therapy: Beginning With Thought, Language, and Meaning
Many familiar forms of therapy begin with conscious thought. We might explore what happened, what you were thinking, what you believed an interaction meant, what assumptions appeared, what story your mind began telling, or what pattern you recognize now that you have some distance from the moment. This kind of work uses language, reflection, insight, cognition, and meaning to help us understand experience.
Sometimes understanding changes everything. At other times, you can understand something beautifully and still find yourself doing it. You know you have every right to say no, but your heart races every time you try. Perhaps you understand that disagreement does not automatically mean rejection, yet conflict still sends something inside you scrambling to repair the relationship immediately. Even rest can become complicated: logically, you know you have every right to stop being productive, while another part of you becomes uncomfortable the moment you do.
Insight has arrived, but some other part of the story may not have caught up yet.
Bottom-Up Therapy: Beginning With What Is Happening
Bottom-up exploration gives us another doorway. Rather than beginning only with what you are thinking, we may become curious about what is happening right now. Perhaps your stomach drops, your shoulders tighten, your voice changes, or your breathing becomes shallow. Maybe you suddenly cannot find words, want to leave, become very still, or feel an unexpected wave of exhaustion. Something has happened before you have fully made sense of it.
Somatic work allows us to become curious about that experience without assuming we already know what it means. We are not asking the body to replace thought. We are simply allowing bodily experience to contribute information to the conversation.
Where Top-Down and Bottom-Up Therapy Meet
In actual therapy, top-down and bottom-up work do not need to compete. They can weave together, often within the same few minutes. Imagine noticing that your chest tightens whenever you sense someone’s disappointment. That gives us bodily information. As we stay curious, you realize that another person’s disappointment immediately makes you think you have done something wrong. Now we have meaning. You notice that your next move is almost always to fix the situation, explain yourself, apologize, or make the other person feel better. Now we have behavior.
Perhaps, as the story unfolds, you recognize that keeping everyone happy once helped keep things peaceful. Now we have history. Eventually you find language for something even deeper: part of you still seems to experience someone else’s disappointment as an emergency. Now we have parts, relationship, learning, memory, and story woven into the same experience.
This is the heart of integrative somatic work. The body does not replace the story. It helps us hear more of it.
When You Understand Everything and Still Feel Stuck
Some people arrive in therapy already extraordinarily good at understanding themselves. They know their attachment patterns and can identify cognitive distortions. Perhaps they understand how childhood experiences shaped certain relationship dynamics and can explain exactly why a particular interaction activated them. Give them enough time and a whiteboard and they may be able to teach the psychoeducation portion of the session themselves.
And yet they are still hurting.
This does not mean insight has failed. Thinking can be protective, regulating, pleasurable, culturally reinforced, neurodivergently preferred, or simply someone’s strongest way of making sense of experience. Intellectualizing is often discussed as though thinking itself is the problem, when sometimes thinking has been one of the person’s most reliable tools.
Somatic therapy does not need to take that tool away. It simply adds more instruments to the orchestra.
Instead of only asking why you respond the way you do, we might also become curious about what happens immediately before the response. What changes in your body when the conversation shifts? Perhaps you become curious about what happens when you imagine behaving differently, even though you understand intellectually that you are allowed to. Then you might notice what emerges when you stop explaining the experience for a moment and simply observe what is happening.
Sometimes the next layer of therapy is not another explanation. It is an experience.
We Are Storytelling Creatures
Story runs deeply through the way we approach therapy at Storm Haven. This does not mean every therapy session needs a beginning, middle, dramatic climax, and satisfying final chapter. Human lives are considerably less cooperative than that. Rather, human beings naturally make meaning through story. We carry stories about who we are, who other people are, what relationships mean, what we must do to belong, what makes us worthy, what happens when we disappoint someone, what we are allowed to need, and what kind of person we are supposed to become.
Some of these stories were deliberately taught to us. Others accumulated so quietly that we barely recognize them as stories at all. We may simply experience them as truth: I am too much. I have to be useful to belong. Conflict means something is wrong. Other people’s needs should come before mine. I should be able to handle this. Rest has to be earned.
Sometimes we consciously stop believing an old story long before every part of us stops responding to it. Someone may genuinely believe they are allowed to say no while their heart begins pounding whenever they set a boundary. Another person may understand that disagreement does not mean abandonment while their body responds as though loss might be coming. This does not mean they are failing at therapy or healing. It may simply mean different parts of their experience learned different versions of the story.
Story Is More Than Words
Stories do not only arrive in paragraphs. They can emerge through metaphor, imagery, dreams, memories, humor, symbols, protective parts, relationship patterns, sensations, and impulses. Someone might say, “I feel like I am carrying everyone,” and there is already an entire story living inside that sentence. Then they notice the heaviness in their shoulders, and perhaps we become curious about both.
Who are you carrying? When did you learn that carrying people was your job? What happens when you imagine putting some of that weight down? Does relief appear, or guilt, fear, sadness, resistance, perhaps even anger? What do you notice when you merely consider the possibility that everyone else’s wellbeing might not belong entirely to you?
Suddenly metaphor, cognition, relationship, bodily experience, history, and story are sitting around the same table. Therapy becomes less about discovering one correct explanation and more about listening to the different languages through which a person has learned to speak.
“Where Do You Feel That in Your Body?”
If you have spent enough time in therapy, someone has probably asked where you feel something in your body. For some people, the answer comes immediately: the throat, the stomach, the chest, the jaw. For others, the most accurate answer is, “I genuinely have no idea,” and that is a perfectly acceptable response.
Some people experience bodily sensations vividly, while others notice imagery more readily. An experience may feel like a wall, a knot, static, heaviness, pressure, or the strange sensation of being ten feet away from yourself. Others notice almost nothing at all. The ability to perceive internal bodily signals is often discussed through the concept of interoception, and people vary considerably in how they notice, interpret, and respond to those signals. Research suggests that interoceptive experience can vary with factors including sensory processing, attention, stress, and neurodevelopmental differences, although findings vary considerably depending on what aspect of interoception researchers measure and how they measure it. There is no single neurodivergent interoceptive profile that applies to everyone.
If your therapist asks what you notice in your body and your answer is “absolutely nothing,” you have not failed the assignment because there was never supposed to be an assignment. Not knowing is information too.
What Does a Therapist Do With Somatic Information?
This is where somatic therapy becomes much more interesting than simply locating an emotion somewhere between your collarbone and your knees. Suppose you notice tightness in your chest. We could identify it, congratulate ourselves on successfully locating the chest, and move along, but nothing particularly useful has happened yet.
Instead, your therapist may become curious with you about when you first noticed the sensation and whether anything changed when you mentioned a particular person or situation. Perhaps it becomes stronger when you imagine saying no but softens when you imagine having more time to decide. Maybe you have an impulse to move, create distance, stand, look away, or simply stop paying attention to the sensation altogether. Any of those responses can offer information.
Sometimes the purpose is simply to build awareness. Perhaps you usually recognize anxiety only after you are completely overwhelmed, but over time you begin noticing that your breathing changes, your shoulders rise, your thoughts speed up, or your sensory tolerance decreases much earlier. Instead of discovering that you are overwhelmed only after your nervous system has begun sending increasingly dramatic correspondence, you begin recognizing the earlier signals. That does not guarantee that you will never become overwhelmed. It simply gives you information sooner, and earlier information can create more options.
From Awareness to Patterns and Possibility
At other times, we are looking for patterns. Perhaps you discover that your chest tightens specifically when someone is disappointed in you, that you become exhausted after social situations where you have spent hours monitoring how you are being perceived, or that restlessness appears whenever you need something but do not feel permitted to ask for it. One isolated sensation may tell us very little. Patterns begin to tell stories.
Therapy can also become a place to experiment. We might notice what happens if you stand while talking, move your hands, look away, walk, create more physical distance, reduce sensory input, add sensory input, imagine saying no, or allow yourself not to answer immediately. The goal is not to find the correct therapeutic posture or make your nervous system perform properly. Instead, we are changing one piece of the experience and becoming curious about what happens next. Sometimes the experiment changes something and sometimes it does not. Both outcomes give us information.
Eventually, my chest gets tight whenever someone is disappointed in me may become someone else’s disappointment feels like an emergency. Now the experience has opened into a larger story. We can become curious about where that meaning came from, whether it still fits your present life, what part of you believes it, and what happens when another part of you considers a different possibility. The bodily experience has not given us a diagnosis or revealed a hidden truth. It has simply become one thread connecting cognition, relationship, history, emotion, and meaning.
Somatic Information Is Data, Not a Verdict
The body can provide meaningful information without becoming an oracle. Feeling anxious does not automatically mean something is dangerous, just as feeling uncomfortable does not necessarily mean something is wrong. Feeling calm around someone does not prove that person is trustworthy, and feeling activated does not prove that trauma has been uncovered.
Bodies respond to an enormous number of things, including emotion, environment, relationships, sensory input, pain, illness, medication, fatigue, hunger, memory, expectations, neurodivergence, learning, and whatever unfortunate position you slept in last night. Sometimes tight shoulders invite psychological curiosity, and sometimes you need a better pillow.
This distinction becomes especially important when we talk about feeling “safe.” Safety has become a prominent word in nervous-system conversations, but feeling comfortable and being safe are not always the same thing. Setting a boundary for the first time may feel deeply uncomfortable. Allowing someone to care for you can feel vulnerable. Being visible after years of masking may create activation. Trying something unfamiliar but meaningful may make your heart race.
Rather than assuming discomfort means stop or calm means go, therapy can help us ask more nuanced questions. Is something actually dangerous? Is this unfamiliarity? Vulnerability? Excitement? Exposure? A boundary being crossed? An old expectation arriving in a new situation? Bodily experience contributes information, while context, cognition, relationship, history, and choice help us understand what to do with it.
Somatic Awareness Should Not Become Self-Surveillance
There is another side to all this nervous-system awareness that deserves attention. Once we learn the language, it can become tempting to monitor ourselves constantly. We can begin checking every heartbeat, breath, muscle twitch, mood shift, and moment of fatigue as though our bodies have become dashboards requiring continuous diagnostic supervision.
We may find ourselves wondering whether we are regulated, what nervous-system state we are in, why our shoulder tightened, whether something was a trauma response, or what a particular sensation means. Somatic awareness should ideally create more freedom, not another form of self-surveillance.
You do not need to analyze every sensation or remain perpetually aware of your nervous system. Sometimes noticing matters, curiosity is useful, and a bodily response is worth exploring. And sometimes you get to eat lunch without turning it into a case study.
The goal is not to become hypervigilant toward yourself. It is to have another language available when that language is useful.
Somatic Therapy Is Not Only for Trauma
Somatic therapy is frequently discussed in relation to trauma, and bodily awareness can absolutely be incorporated into trauma therapy. Yet therapy itself is much larger than trauma treatment. You do not need to experience trauma, reach a crisis, or cross some imaginary threshold of suffering before therapy becomes meaningful.
Our healthcare and insurance systems often organize psychotherapy around diagnoses, symptoms, impairment, and medical necessity. Those frameworks serve particular purposes, especially when determining healthcare coverage, but they do not encompass every reason a human being might find therapy valuable.
People also come to therapy because they want to understand themselves. They want healthier relationships, greater awareness of their patterns, stronger boundaries, more room to explore identity, or support while navigating transitions. They may want to understand their responses to stress, become more aware of sensory needs, explore the stories they inherited, recognize what restores them, or simply become more intentional about how they want to live.
Therapy does not always have to begin with the question, What is wrong with me? Sometimes the more interesting question is, What would I like to understand about myself?
Therapy Can Be Part of Healthy Living
We do not usually wait until our bodies completely fall apart before deciding that sleep, movement, nourishment, rest, connection, and preventative healthcare might matter. Psychological wellbeing deserves some of that same spaciousness.
Therapy can certainly be reparative, but it can also be exploratory, relational, preventative, developmental, creative, and deeply curious. Sometimes therapy helps us heal from what happened or understand what is happening now. It can help us recognize a pattern before it becomes a crisis, while also giving us somewhere to consider what we would like to happen next.
There does not always need to be something broken before we become interested in understanding how we work.
How Somatic Work Can Be Used in Therapy
Because somatic work is not limited to one diagnosis or experience, it can appear in therapy in many different ways. The same curiosity that helps someone understand anxiety may also illuminate relationship patterns, boundaries, grief, neurodivergence, burnout, masking, identity, or the quieter work of becoming more familiar with oneself.
Anxiety
Anxiety is not only something we think. It can be accompanied by changes in breathing, heart rate, muscle tension, digestion, temperature, movement, concentration, and sensory sensitivity. Somatic awareness may help someone recognize activation earlier and become curious about what they need before the experience becomes overwhelming.
It can also help us explore experiences that initially seem similar. Anxiety, excitement, sensory overload, anticipation, anger, and overstimulation can sometimes arrive wearing remarkably similar coats. Learning how those experiences differ for you can make it easier to respond to what is actually happening rather than to the broad category of I feel weird and I would like it to stop.
ADHD, Autism, and Neurodivergence
Somatic work can be especially interesting when exploring neurodivergent experience because attention, sensory processing, movement, interoception, transitions, stimulation, depletion, masking, and emotional activation may all shape how someone experiences and notices their body.
One person may notice hunger only once it becomes intense, while another may experience internal sensations very vividly. Movement may help someone concentrate, while eye contact may make thinking more difficult. Someone may need less sensory input in one environment and more in another, or discover that what matters most is not the amount of stimulation but whether it is predictable and within their control.
There is no single way that ADHD, autism, or neurodivergence affects interoception, sensory processing, or regulation. A neurodivergent-affirming approach does not teach someone the correct way to have a nervous system. It helps them become curious about the one they actually have.
Relationships
Relationships happen in bodies too. Someone moves closer while someone else pulls away. A voice changes. A face changes. A perfectly ordinary question suddenly lands as criticism. One person reaches toward connection while the other person experiences the approach as pressure.
Somatic awareness can help people recognize what happens immediately before they pursue, withdraw, defend, appease, freeze, shut down, or become overwhelmed. That awareness allows us to understand relationship patterns from the inside rather than merely labeling the behavior after everyone is already hurt.
Boundaries
Many people intellectually understand boundaries long before setting them becomes comfortable. The word no may be cognitively available while the body responds with guilt, fear, tension, nausea, or urgency.
Somatic exploration may help someone recognize an important distinction between this boundary is dangerous and I have learned to experience disappointing someone as dangerous. Those statements can feel remarkably similar while telling very different stories about what is happening now.
Grief
Grief can have a physical landscape. It may feel heavy, restless, numb, exhausted, hollow, agitated, pressured, aching, or strangely absent. Sometimes grief arrives through thought and memory, while other times bodily changes are among the first things someone notices.
Somatic work gives both experiences room without requiring grief to look a particular way. There is no correct bodily performance of loss any more than there is one correct emotional one.
Burnout and Chronic Stress
Many people become extraordinarily skilled at functioning beyond their own limits. They finish the task, attend the meeting, care for everyone, answer the email, make dinner, solve the problem, and keep going until suddenly they cannot.
Somatic awareness can help us become interested in what happened before the collapse. Perhaps there were earlier signals that went unnoticed or were deliberately overridden because the environment did not seem to offer another option. Therapy can become a place to explore those experiences alongside the demands, expectations, sensory load, relationships, and beliefs that made continuing feel necessary.
The goal is not to become better at tolerating endless demands. Sometimes the information we gather suggests that something about the environment, pace, expectations, boundaries, or available resources needs to change.
Identity and Masking
There can also be something profoundly useful about noticing how we experience different versions of ourselves. What happens when you feel watched? What changes when you are performing competence, monitoring your expression, trying to appear interested, or carefully choosing the version of yourself most likely to be acceptable in the room?
Then we can become equally curious about what happens around people with whom you do not have to work quite so hard. Perhaps your voice changes, your body takes up more space, movement becomes more spontaneous, or you simply feel less tired afterward.
Sometimes therapy becomes a place to explore the difference between the self we learned to perform and the self that begins appearing when performance is no longer required.
Restraint Collapse: When the Body Finally Gets Home
A person may spend an entire workday, school day, social event, or period of caregiving functioning remarkably well. They manage demands, navigate noise, make decisions, monitor social expectations, remain pleasant, complete tasks, and hold everything together. Then they get home and suddenly find themselves irritable, tearful, exhausted, restless, withdrawn, or unable to tolerate one more person asking one more perfectly reasonable question.
This pattern is sometimes described informally as restraint collapse. The term is not a clinical diagnosis, but it can offer useful language for exploring what happens when someone has spent substantial energy managing demands, sensory input, expectations, masking, or self-regulation and then reaches an environment where some of those efforts loosen.
From the outside, the confusing question may be, Why did I seem fine all day and then fall apart around the people I feel safest with? Somatic curiosity offers another question: What did it take for me to appear fine all day?
Perhaps the collapse did not begin when you walked through the front door. Perhaps that was simply the moment when holding everything together was no longer required. Looking at the experience this way can open conversations about masking, sensory load, demands, being perceived, cumulative stress, energy expenditure, transitions, predictability, and what someone needs when moving from one environment into another.
It may also invite us to reconsider what we mean when we say we were “fine.” Sometimes functioning reflects available capacity. Sometimes it reflects how skilled we have become at spending resources we will have to repay later.
Somatic Therapy and Neurodivergence: Regulation Is Personal
Much of the popular conversation about nervous-system regulation quietly assumes that regulation looks like stillness. Close your eyes, sit quietly, take a deep breath, focus inward, and eventually become very calm. For some people, this is lovely. For others, absolutely not.
Movement may help someone regulate or concentrate. Looking away may make talking easier. Pacing may support processing. Predictability may matter more than relaxation. Deep breathing may feel uncomfortable, while focusing intensely on internal sensations may increase distress rather than decrease it. Someone may need less stimulation, more stimulation, different stimulation, or simply enough control over the stimulation that they are not constantly preparing for surprises.
This is one reason somatic therapy needs to remain relational and individualized. A neurodivergent-affirming approach begins with the person rather than the exercise. We are not trying to make someone’s body conform to our idea of regulation. We are learning what regulation, engagement, rest, stimulation, concentration, connection, and recovery actually look like for them.
Somatic Therapy Is Not About Being Calm All the Time
Somewhere along the way, nervous-system language wandered into wellness culture and “regulated” occasionally became synonymous with “calm.” Human nervous systems did not receive that memo.
Human beings naturally move through changing emotional and physiological states. Excitement can activate us. Anger can mobilize us. Attraction can change our attention and physiology. Play can be wonderfully activating. Grief can change the body, and focused attention may narrow our awareness of everything else. Sometimes we need activation, while other times we need rest, movement, stillness, solitude, stimulation, connection, or something that does not fit neatly into any of those categories.
The goal is not to become a perfectly regulated human who wanders peacefully through every conflict with an impressive resting heart rate. A more useful goal may be developing greater awareness, flexibility, capacity, recovery, choice, and understanding. We are not trying to flatten the landscape of human experience. We are learning how to travel through more of it without losing ourselves.
Somatic Therapy Is Also About What Makes You Feel Alive
If we only pay attention to bodily experience when something feels wrong, we miss half the conversation.
Somatic awareness can also help us recognize pleasure, curiosity, interest, creativity, play, connection, belonging, desire, satisfaction, comfort, and aliveness. We can become curious about what happens when we are deeply engaged in something we love, when we are around people with whom we do not have to perform, or when an idea catches fire and we suddenly realize three hours have passed.
Perhaps your breathing changes around someone you trust. Your humor comes back. You talk with your hands. Your shoulders drop. You become more animated, more playful, or more willing to take up space. Maybe your thoughts become expansive instead of tightly monitored. Perhaps you notice that certain environments leave you pleasantly tired rather than depleted, or that there are relationships after which you feel more like yourself rather than less.
This matters because therapy is not only about learning the warning signs of distress. It can also help us become more familiar with the experiences associated with aliveness.
What does genuine interest feel like for you? Consider how enough rest feels before exhaustion forces it, or what happens when connection does not require constant monitoring. You might also notice what shifts when a yes is actually a yes, when curiosity pulls you toward something, or when you feel competent, creative, playful, or deeply at home.
Knowing what hurts matters. Knowing what nourishes us matters too.
Somatic Therapy Happens Between People
Somatic work is sometimes described as though it involves one person sitting alone and carefully observing their internal sensations, but we also respond within relationships.
The therapeutic relationship itself can become part of that experience. A therapist’s pacing, tone, facial expression, predictability, distance, humor, silence, curiosity, and responsiveness can all become part of what happens in the room. This does not mean a therapist possesses some perfectly regulated nervous system that can magically lend calmness to someone else. Therapists are humans too.
It does mean that relationships give us information.
Sometimes a meaningful therapeutic experience is not an exercise at all. It is telling someone something you were certain would make them recoil and discovering that they stayed. It is expressing anger without the relationship immediately collapsing, saying no without having to spend the next ten minutes taking care of the other person’s feelings, becoming quiet without someone demanding that you speak, or admitting that you do not know without being rushed toward an answer.
You may notice the impact of these experiences before you have language for them. Over time, therapy can become a relationship in which we notice what happens between us rather than only talking about what happens everywhere else. That relational information can help us understand expectations, protective responses, connection, boundaries, and the stories we carry about what happens when we allow ourselves to be known.
What Does Somatic Therapy Actually Look Like in a Session?
Somatic therapy can be difficult to recognize from the outside because sometimes it looks like an exercise and sometimes it looks almost exactly like ordinary conversation. A therapist might invite you to notice your breathing without changing it, stand, walk, experiment with posture, orient to the room, notice sensory input, create more distance, use grounding, explore a gesture, track tension, work with imagery, or notice an impulse.
At other times, the most somatic thing that happens during an entire session may be your therapist noticing, “You got very quiet when you said that. Did you notice?” Rather than immediately interpreting the silence, they leave enough room for you to discover what happened.
Perhaps you realize you became afraid, were thinking, or lost access to words for a moment. Maybe something suddenly came back to you, or your attention shifted toward a noise in the hallway and you temporarily stopped following the conversation. The observation opens a door. You still get to decide what is on the other side.
Somatic Therapy Should Preserve Choice
The body should not become another place where clients lose autonomy. You do not have to close your eyes, breathe deeply, remain focused on an uncomfortable sensation, move, shake, stretch, touch your body, make eye contact, or accept your therapist’s interpretation of what a bodily response means.
Sometimes turning toward sensation helps, while at other times turning away is exactly what is needed. Movement may help, or talking might be the thing that allows something to shift. And occasionally, humor opens a door that ten minutes of carefully orchestrated breathing exercises absolutely did not. Sometimes the most regulating thing you can do is stop doing the regulation exercise that is making you increasingly irritated.
Somatic work should expand choice rather than shrink it. If the purpose of therapy is to help someone develop greater awareness and agency, it would be rather contradictory to accomplish that by teaching them to override themselves in the therapy room.
How Somatic Therapy Can Be Woven Into Other Therapy Approaches
One of the things we appreciate about somatic work at Storm Haven is how naturally bodily awareness can be woven into other ways of understanding people. Rather than existing as a separate island, it can become another language available within parts work, ACT, relationship therapy, EMDR, depth-oriented and Jungian work, story-centered therapy, and many other approaches. These therapies have different theoretical foundations and different levels and types of empirical support; incorporating bodily awareness into them does not make them interchangeable or imply that they share one evidence base.
Somatic Therapy Across Different Therapeutic Modalities
In parts work or IFS-informed therapy, for example, someone may experience what they understand as a protective part through bodily sensations or impulses as well as thoughts and emotions. Tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, an urge to flee, sudden exhaustion, or a posture that makes the person smaller may become part of what we explore. Rather than assuming we know what those experiences mean, we can become curious about what the person associates with them and what changes as the experience unfolds.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy offers another doorway by asking whether an uncomfortable internal experience must disappear before we can choose an action connected to what matters. Sometimes psychological flexibility means discovering that discomfort can accompany us while we still choose. At other times, paying attention to discomfort helps us recognize that a different choice is needed. The work is developing enough awareness to explore the difference.
In relationship and couples therapy, bodily awareness can help slow interactions enough to notice the moment before the familiar dance begins. We might become curious about what happened immediately before someone withdrew, what they experienced when a partner moved closer, or what changed internally when someone felt misunderstood. Often we recognize the relationship pattern only after it has gathered momentum. Somatic awareness may help us hear the first few notes rather than recognizing the song only once everyone is already singing their familiar part.
Within EMDR, bodily sensations can become one aspect of noticing memories, beliefs, emotions, images, and present experiences during treatment. Depth-oriented and Jungian approaches offer still another language, making room for dreams, imagery, metaphor, archetype, symbol, movement, and sensation when psychological experience has not yet organized itself into orderly sentences.
From Different Modalities Back to Story
Eventually, we return again to story because story helps us weave experiences together. We may wonder what story someone learned about a particular sensation, what role they tend to occupy when it appears, and whether that role resembles the caretaker, protector, peacemaker, performer, responsible one, invisible one, or something entirely their own.
Sometimes we discover that a familiar response seems connected to an older chapter even while another part of the person is beginning to write something new. Somatic work does not require us to erase the old story or shame the part that learned it. Those stories and adaptations often developed for reasons that once made considerable sense. Therapy simply gives us somewhere to ask whether the old story is still the only story available.
Learning the Dialect of Your Own Body
There is no universal body dictionary hidden somewhere in your therapist’s office. Tight shoulders do not always mean anxiety, restlessness does not always mean avoidance, fatigue does not always mean depression, and silence does not always mean shutdown. The work is more personal than that.
Over time, you may begin recognizing that you become irritable when overstimulated or stop noticing hunger when deeply focused. Perhaps your shoulders rise when you begin taking responsibility for someone else’s feelings, while becoming very still actually means you are concentrating rather than frightened. Maybe your stomach drops whenever you anticipate disappointing someone, movement helps you think, or exhaustion reliably follows environments where you spend hours monitoring how other people perceive you.
You may also begin recognizing what restores you. Perhaps you feel more like yourself around people who do not require you to perform. Maybe your thoughts become clearer while walking, you settle when plans are predictable, or you need solitude after being perceived all day. Perhaps there are places where your humor becomes easier, your curiosity returns, you take up more space, and you recognize the feeling of belonging not because someone has told you that you belong but because some part of you has stopped preparing to leave.
In this sense, somatic therapy is not about teaching you the language of the body. It is about learning the dialect of your own body. The therapist is not standing outside you with a translation manual. Ideally, the two of you are learning the language together.
The Story Your Body Has Been Helping You Tell
Think back to the person sitting on the therapy couch at the beginning of this story, explaining that the argument was not a big deal. Their stomach tightened when the therapist asked what they had wanted to say, and they answered that they wanted to say nothing.
Maybe they still do not know exactly why their stomach tightened. They do not have to.
Perhaps, after sitting with the moment, they realize they actually did want to say something. They wanted to say no, ask for more time, or have the other person stop. Part of them wanted to explain themselves, too, but they were afraid it would make things worse. Or perhaps they still cannot find words and simply recognize that something happened.
That recognition can be enough to begin.
Our stories are not only the stories we consciously tell. They may also appear in what we brace against, what we move toward, what makes us disappear, what allows us to take up space, what exhausts us, what restores us, what makes us laugh, what causes our breath to catch, and what finally allows us to exhale.
Therapy gives us somewhere to become curious about all of it. Sometimes that curiosity helps us understand something that happened long ago, while sometimes it helps us recognize what is happening in a relationship right now. It may allow us to notice our limits before we have crossed them, understand the difference between surviving an environment and actually feeling at home within it, or recognize that a response we have spent years judging may once have developed for a very understandable reason.
Learning Yourself Without Needing to Fix Yourself
And sometimes there is nothing broken that needs to be repaired. We are simply learning ourselves.
Somatic therapy brings the body into a conversation it has been part of all along, while story gives us a way to weave those experiences together. The goal is not to arrive at one perfect explanation of who we are, but to create something spacious enough to hold thought, sensation, memory, relationship, identity, imagination, contradiction, history, possibility, and choice.
Perhaps that is one of the quieter gifts of therapy. We get to become curious about the stories we inherited, the stories we learned because they helped us survive or belong, the stories our bodies may still anticipate, and the stories we may now have enough room to continue, revise, retire, or write differently.
Frequently Asked Questions About Somatic Therapy
What is somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy is an umbrella term for therapeutic approaches that intentionally include bodily experiences such as sensations, movement, posture, breathing, and sensory awareness alongside thoughts, emotions, behaviors, memories, relationships, and meaning. Somatic techniques can also be integrated into many forms of talk therapy, so working somatically does not necessarily mean choosing an entirely separate type of psychotherapy. Because the term encompasses different approaches, the evidence base varies depending on the specific intervention and the concern being treated.
Is somatic therapy only for trauma?
No. Somatic approaches are frequently discussed in trauma therapy, but bodily awareness can also be incorporated into therapy addressing anxiety, relationships, boundaries, grief, burnout, stress, neurodivergence, identity, life transitions, emotional awareness, and personal growth. Therapy itself does not have to begin with trauma or crisis. Somatic awareness can also be part of proactively learning how you experience and move through your life.
What happens during somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy can look very different depending on the therapist, therapeutic approach, and client. It may include ordinary conversation alongside noticing sensations, posture, breathing, movement, sensory experiences, physical impulses, changes in energy, or how bodily experience shifts while discussing particular experiences. Somatic work may also include collaborative experiments with movement, grounding, distance, sensory input, imagery, or other ways of increasing awareness and choice.
Why does my therapist ask where I feel something in my body?
A therapist may ask about bodily sensations to help you notice patterns, recognize responses earlier, connect bodily experiences with thoughts or relationships, or explore what changes as you discuss something. The purpose should not be to assign a universal psychological meaning to a sensation. Instead, the question offers another source of information that you and your therapist can explore together.
What if I cannot feel emotions in my body?
That is okay. People differ in interoceptive awareness, or how they notice and interpret signals from inside the body. Some people experience sensations very clearly, while others notice them faintly, inconsistently, or only once they become intense. Neurodivergence, sensory processing, attention, stress, and other individual differences may be associated with differences in this experience. You do not have to identify a bodily sensation to participate meaningfully in therapy, and “I don’t know” can itself be useful information.
What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up therapy?
Top-down and bottom-up are useful shorthand for different ways therapists may approach experience. Top-down work often begins with thoughts, language, beliefs, meaning, and conscious reflection, while bottom-up work may begin with sensations, movement, sensory experiences, or physiological responses. They are not two completely separate systems, and many therapists move among body, thought, emotion, relationship, memory, behavior, and meaning depending on what is useful for the person sitting with them.
Can talk therapy include somatic techniques?
Yes. Therapists using ACT, parts-based approaches, EMDR, relationship therapy, depth-oriented or Jungian therapy, mindfulness-based approaches, psychodynamic therapy, and other forms of psychotherapy may incorporate somatic awareness into their work. Somatic work can therefore become one thread within a larger integrative therapy rather than requiring an entirely separate modality.
Can somatic therapy help with ADHD or autism?
Somatic approaches may offer some neurodivergent people a way to explore experiences related to interoception, sensory processing, movement, masking, transitions, emotional awareness, energy, overwhelm, and regulation. Research on interoception in ADHD and autism is still developing and does not support one universal neurodivergent profile. A neurodivergent-affirming approach adapts the work to the individual rather than treating ADHD or autism itself as something that needs to be corrected. The goal is greater self-understanding, not making a neurodivergent person behave more neurotypically.
Do I have to close my eyes or do breathing exercises during somatic therapy?
No. Somatic therapy should be collaborative, and closing your eyes, breathing exercises, movement, touch, or sustained attention to bodily sensations should not be requirements. Different people regulate and process information differently. A useful somatic approach remains curious about what works for you rather than assuming one exercise should work for everyone.
Does every bodily sensation have a psychological meaning?
No. Bodily sensations can be influenced by emotions and psychological experiences, but they can also be shaped by sleep, hunger, illness, pain, medication, sensory input, movement, environment, hormones, and many other factors. Somatic therapy invites curiosity rather than assuming that every physical sensation contains a hidden psychological message.
Therapy for the Whole Person at Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness
If you have made it this far, perhaps some part of this article felt familiar. You may have spent years understanding why you do what you do while still wondering why the pattern keeps returning. You may recognize that bodily responses sometimes appear before you have words for what is happening, or that you notice your needs only once they have become impossible to ignore. Perhaps you have become very skilled at appearing fine, taking care of other people, thinking your way through difficult experiences, or adapting yourself to whatever room you happen to be standing in.
Or perhaps none of those things describe you. Nothing is particularly wrong. You are simply curious about yourself and would like therapy to have room for more than symptom reduction.
That is the kind of room we try to create at Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness.
Our therapists provide neurodivergent-affirming and LGBTQIA+ affirming therapy for teens and adults, couples, and families, with in-person counseling in Temecula, California, and telehealth therapy throughout California. Our work may include thoughts and emotions, but there is also room for relationships, stories, identities, nervous-system responses, sensory experiences, protective parts, patterns, symbols, memories, humor, movement, contradiction, and the quieter information we gather through bodily experience.
You do not have to arrive knowing exactly what is wrong, what modality you need, or even what you want to talk about. Something may be difficult, something may keep repeating, something may be changing, or something may simply no longer fit the way it once did. You may want to understand your relationships, your nervous system, your neurodivergence, your story, or yourself with a little more compassion and considerably more curiosity.
At Storm Haven, you are not asked to fit in. You are invited to belong. There is room for your story here.
Author Note
Jennifer Hyatt, LMFT, is a licensed psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, writer, educator, and founder of Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness in Temecula, California. She is the author of The Understory: Going Beneath the Surface in Psychotherapy, creator of The Nerdie Therapist, and a podcaster exploring the wonderfully layered places where psychology, story, symbolism, neurodivergence, relationships, and the practice of therapy intersect.
Her approach to psychotherapy is integrative, neurodivergent-affirming, relational, and depth-oriented, drawing from contemporary psychological science alongside approaches that make room for story, parts, symbolism, dreams, archetypes, relationships, and embodied experience. She is particularly interested in what lives beneath the surface of our experiences: the stories we inherit, the patterns we develop, the roles we learn to inhabit, the relationships that shape us, and the ways mind and body participate in how we experience ourselves and the world around us.
Through her clinical work, supervision, teaching, and writing, Jennifer approaches therapy as more than a place people go when something is wrong. It can also be a place for curiosity, meaning-making, self-understanding, growth, and the ongoing work of becoming more fully ourselves. She writes about psychotherapy with an emphasis on making complex psychological ideas accessible without flattening their nuance, leaving room for science, story, lived experience, humor, curiosity, and the wonderfully complicated business of being human.
Disclaimer
The information provided in this blog is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to serve as medical, mental health, legal, or other professional advice. Reading this article does not establish a therapist-client relationship with Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness or any of its providers. Every individual and situation is unique, and information presented here should not be used as a substitute for individualized assessment, diagnosis, or treatment from a qualified professional.
If you are experiencing mental health concerns, please consult with a qualified mental health professional who can provide care appropriate to your individual needs and circumstances. In the event of a medical emergency or immediate danger, call 911 or go to your nearest emergency department. If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or a mental health crisis in the United States, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.