what
Somatic therapy is a form of therapeutic support that is concerned with bodily experience. We take the body’s internal, subjective experience as the starting point to explore any issue or pattern in your life.
For example, we may inquire:
- when that happened, how did your body respond? what did you feel?
- right now, as you think of this, what sensations do you notice?
- what does your body want you to do? what is it spontaneously doing in this moment as we explore?
- how can we allow these feelings and responses to move through you?
- can we find enough safety, permission, acceptance etc…so it becomes possible to move through this experience?
This kind of work goes deeper than talking, analysing, interpreting or strategising, and takes us into the root of our experience: sensations, emotions, felt sense, motion, intuition, imagination. All that is in the subconscious manifests in the body.
The mind is like the wind and the body like the sand: if you want to know how the wind is blowing, you can look at the sand.
—Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
why
If you’ve ever felt that thinking something through or talking about it, wasn’t enough; or that you’ve talked and worked on something and are still unable to shift it—the answer might lie in your body and deep brain.
The cognitive, conscious, talking-thinking parts of us live in the frontal lobe (the part of the brain just behind the forehead). Emotions, stress responses, implicit memory and trauma imprints live in the subcortical brain, brain stem and the whole nervous system (from the back of the head through the base of the skull down into the body).
The body holds information that we don’t yet have access to. It also holds the key to becoming unstuck; the deeper knowledge and understanding that makes sense beyond logic, the path towards integration.
Working with the body is a form of deep self-care and attentiveness. It involves slowing down and paying enough attention to track and follow somatic cues and signals: breath patterns, postural changes, gestures, shifts in sensory orienting, movement impulses, tone and timbre of voice, energetic and temperature changes in the body…
By attending to and gently supporting these on-going processes, we allow the body and nervous system to complete stuck responses, to unburden held emotions and states, and to discover the new possibilities that emerge when there is enough safety, presence, and support.
how it works
resourcing and processing
Broadly speaking, there are two ways in which I work with the body and nervous system: resourcing and processing.
Resourcing involves orienting to supportive experiences that the nervous system needs to be able to handle whatever is coming up or going on in your life. We usually do this through somatic practices like orienting, breath, grounding, guided rest, intuitive movement, and so on. When the body is resourced, we are able to stay present with difficult experiences and work through them. When we are under-resourced, our stress and survival responses kick in, which makes it harder to be present with whatever is arising, and often leads to acting out or suppression.
Resourcing is part of nervous system regulation and education; it builds the practical skills that you need to be able to soothe and support your nervous system as it moves through different states like activation or shutdown.
Where there is a history of trauma, it can be harder to access and absorb resources—which is why we spend time practising this together in sessions. The work of resourcing creates more capacity in the system to be able to process deeper material where you may be stuck. Resourcing is foundational to processing.
Processing involves mindfully attending to and working through states, emotions and experiences that the body is carrying. In somatic processing, we make space for the nervous system to explore and experience all of its responses to a situation within a container of safety and connection. This allows the brain and body to move out of survival states and into more expansive ways of being.
Somatic processing differs from talk therapy in that the body’s experience is consciously accessed and allowed. We make room for sensation, emotion, intuition, feeling, imagery and so on, alongside thoughts, beliefs and ideas. Because bodily experience is usually subconscious, processing somatically can often access deeper layers of things that have already been explored cognitively. It also puts us in direct contact with our innate wisdom, clarity and confidence that have been blocked by dysregulation, trauma and challenging life experiences.
top-down and bottom-up
There is a difference between working with the body and allowing the body to lead; what I offer is the latter.
It is possible to work with the body but still be managing or controlling the body’s experience from the mind, or the top-down. This approach treats the body as a tool or a vehicle to achieve the goals that the mind has decided upon. If you’ve ever received instructions to shake, dance, breathe and you’ll release whatever you’re feeling—these are forms of top-down intervention, despite their purported inclusion of the body. (There is nothing wrong with working in this way; it can be helpful in some moments, when contextualised properly and used with the right intentions. However, this approach can only go so far, and without adequate context, can also be misleading and create more control or mistrust of the body.)
When the body leads, we offer it the time, space and permission to decide what it wants to do with whatever is coming up. Sometimes that might still be to shake, dance or breathe; but this happens organically, from the bottom-up. Bottom-up approaches hinge on trusting the nervous system and body’s ability and knowledge, more than imposing techniques or strategies that we think will help. If we do offer a tool, it is with the intention of creating more safety to be with whatever arises (rather than to avoid or bypass whatever is arising).
While this distinction may sound like a technicality, it is really fundamental to creating sustainable healing and transformation. In practice, working bottom-up means that sessions feel slower, safer and more connected to your own inner process and knowing. There is a lesser likelihood that we will override your experience, or go too fast or do too much, and therefore get locked out of the process.
What’s in the brain is in the body, and what’s in the body is in the brain.
—a maxim from Brainspotting
practicalities
Because of the intimate and personal nature of somatic therapy, I offer this only in a 1-1 session format. At the moment, I do not offer couples or group work. If you are seeking relational support, I can work with one or both parties separately in individual sessions.
We generally begin with an intake call or session to get a sense of where you’re coming from and what you need. Sessions can be anywhere from 1-2 hours long, depending on your needs. I usually recommend we meet once a week or once in two weeks, either in-person or online via video call.
The flow of each session is totally unique to you as a person, and what your body presents in the moment. I generally use a combination of the modalities I’m trained in to offer you what attunes mostly closely to your needs.
This might include practices of nervous system regulation and resourcing, and/or somatic exploration or processing of an issue or pattern you’re dealing with. Some sessions might be more exploratory through talking (with the intention of allowing the body to speak), others more experiential and oriented towards the deep-brain and body experience. I recommend you try at least 3-5 sessions before evaluating whether this type of work is right for you.
To get a sense of what sessions can look like, read my series Notes from the Inside.
Feel it in your body and get it out of your frontal lobe.
—Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
Disclaimer: Please note that these sessions do not constitute any form of medical diagnosis, treatment or psychotherapy.
The Wise Body 