Somatic Therapy

Why it is important to keep the body in mind when working with trauma

Trauma shows up in the body. I don’t need to tell you that, though. You’ve noticed how your heart races or jumps at the thought of something, or that quick need to get up and out of the room you’re in. You may have noticed a drop in energy, and how difficult it is to move yourself into your life. All of this is your nervous system trying to help you in the here-and-now, not realizing that the overwhelming thing that happened is actually in the past. A sudden thought, image, or sensation brings it all back.

Somatic therapy works with those body-based reminders to help resolve the symptoms. Talking about them alone will not do this. The body needs to be brought into the process to help resolve this remembering that is happening to you. We can do this even if those sensations feel really scary. The pace and depth will be decided by us depending on your tolerance with your body. You do not need to like your body for somatic therapy to be deeply helpful in resolving some of the harder things that have happened to you in your life.

What is Somatic Therapy?

Somatic psychotherapy is an approach to therapy that asks us to keep the body in mind while we are working with your current experiences. While I may notice possible tension in your body, signaled to me by your shoulders rising up toward your ears, you would confirm the accuracy of that assumption through feeling into your body (a skill you can develop, I promise). I cannot know your internal experience and you are the authority of our interpretation of what is happening within it and being expressed from it.

Somatic practices aim to increase your connection to the information you have inside yourself as well as give you more choice in regulating states like anxiety and dissociation. This may look like feeling into emotional expressions with supportive tools, like resistance bands, and/or tracking sensation to help us understand something that feels true to your body but is different from how you think about what has happened. It may look like grounding through your feet or back-body to lower hypervigilance or standing up and moving as needed. The goal is to integrate and not override your body with rationalizations and logic because, frankly, it doesn’t work. Instead, we will find the meanings that do validate your body’s experience and work with your body to reshape chronic states of distress.

If you could have thought your way out of it, you would have. I know this to be true personally and I have worked with many people who have tried for a long time before getting help.

More about Somatic Therapy

Somatic therapy sounds fancy and foreign to many of us, but it’s really just our relationship to our own body. Answers to some questions can be found here, and feel free to reach out if you have any additional questions.

  • I am trained in a few modalities. My primaries are Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Focusing. I have a personal practice, and ground my politics around the use of somatics, in the generative somatics lineage.

  • We will start with psychoeducation and talk therapy as we get to know each other. Then, if you feel comfortable, I will give you the choice to work with somatic practices in session. These practices support the building of a relationship, so you do not need to have one, or like your body, to start somatic therapy.

  • No! We may choose to embody ourselves for a number of reasons. All of the practices and experiments are beneficial to the wild process of being a human in 2025. I would be honored to help you reconnect without the assumption of trauma present.

  • Thomas Hanna, the man who gave us the term ‘somatics’ (and did so in Gainesville!), defined somatics as “the field which studies the soma: namely, the body as perceived from within by first-person perception.”

    In less academic terms, somatics is the study of how you feel inside and your direct report of it.

  • Touch is completely options and only used if clinically called for. Examples of touch may be a supportive hand on your back to help you locate your backbody, pushing against my hands to express a healthy anger response, or a hug, as requested, at the end of a deeply impactful session.

Begin Somatic Therapy in Gainesville, Florida

You do not have to live disconnected from yourself, or with the ever-present worry that you may panic or dissociate today. Counseling can help transform this experience. To get set up: