How Somatic Therapy Helps You Reconnect with Your Body

Somatic therapy encompasses numerous modalities, including Somatic Experiencing™ (SE), Somatic Trauma Resolution™ (STR), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Brainspotting, hypnotherapy, breathwork techniques, and more. 

When you experience trauma, your nervous system is designed to protect you and it can only respond in certain ways to keep you safe. A word about trauma here before I continue. When people hear the word trauma, they often think of things like sexual assault or physical abuse. However, trauma comes from many sources.

Sources of Trauma

There are numerous sources of trauma, including birth trauma, developmental trauma, medical trauma, car accidents, major injuries, betrayal, neglect, physical, mental, emotional, psychological, verbal, and sexual abuse, natural disasters, war, vicarious trauma, historical, collective, ethnic and racial trauma (and much more).

How the Body Responds to Trauma

From a Somatic perspective, trauma disrupts the healthy functioning of the nervous system, causing dysfunction throughout the entire organism. 

Regardless of the source, trauma is an event that overwhelms the nervous system. The nervous system responds the same way to someone yelling and slamming doors as it does to a tiger chasing you in the jungle. The nervous system is complex, but its response to trauma is simple - keep you alive. And it does that through one of four responses: fight, flight or flee, freeze or collapse, and fawn.

The fight response improves eyesight and hearing, speeds up breathing, and sends blood to your muscles, signaling your body to fight to protect yourself. The flight (also called flee) response signals your body to run away to get you out of danger.

The freeze, or collapse, response occurs when you can’t run away or fight back. The body shuts down and you dissociate so you don’t feel what’s happening. This reduces your experience of overwhelm, terror, fear, and physical pain - all to keep you safe. In a freeze response, your body may feel completely out of your conscious control, unable to move or respond. 

Fawning is your nervous system’s way of avoiding danger or distress by attempting to please others. It manifests as people-pleasing to gain approval or make others like you, difficulty identifying your feelings, trouble saying "no,” over-apologizing, holding back your opinions or preferences, and putting your discomfort, needs, and wants on the back burner. Additionally, you may feel like you don’t have an authentic self, struggle with boundaries, or change your preferences to match others' preferences to avoid rocking the boat.

How Your Body Releases the Stress from Your Nervous System

After a traumatic event is over and your nervous system tells your brain that it’s safe, the brain sends signals to your body to gradually ‘come back online,’ and then the body begins to discharge the trauma from your nervous system. When the body discharges the trauma, you might feel extremely hot or cold, and experience shivering, shaking, sweating, crying, laughing, or uncontrollable body movements or twitches, such as flailing arms or legs, or muscle quivers. 

This is all very normal and helps your body return to normal baseline functioning, or homeostasis. Depending on the type of trauma, your body may come back online within a few minutes, or it may take days or weeks. 

However, most people don’t allow this normal trauma discharge to occur because they don’t understand what’s happening, it might feel scary, or they may feel embarrassed about their body’s reaction if other people are around. 

What Happens if the Trauma Doesn’t Get Released?

If the trauma release is deliberately suppressed, it gets stuck in the body. Over time, it may develop into physical pain, anxiety, depression, autoimmune issues, digestive issues, or chronic disconnection from the body’s sensations and emotions.

You may experience reduced or heightened responses, that don’t make sense to your rational mind. This leads to further difficulty in knowing how you’re truly feeling or how to respond appropriately. Because the trauma is still living in your nervous system and tissues, your response may not match the intensity of the current experience. For example, a loud noise may cause you to shut down and feel numb or anxious, or fly into a rage and not be able to control your emotions or what you say. 

Another example: a loud noise may cause a Fibromyalgia or IBS flare-up, which you don’t connect to the triggering loud noise because there’s a time delay.

The response doesn’t match the loud noise because it’s not the current event that’s causing the response. Rather, the event is triggering the dormant trauma in your nervous system, but your conscious mind doesn’t connect the dots.

This can lead to distrust in the body, creating further disconnection and loss of awareness of the body’s nuanced cues about what it’s responding to and what it needs for support. It seems like the wires get crossed and disconnected at the same time. 

Many clients I have worked with over the years say things such as “I hate that my body does this,” or “I feel betrayed by my body.” It breaks my heart to hear people say these kinds of things because their bodies are just doing what they’re designed to do - keep them safe and alive, even if the response isn’t threatening.

Somatic therapy modalities are designed to reconnect you with your body and clear the original trauma imprints from your nervous system, and foster a bodyfelt sense of safety, enabling you to respond appropriately to current events, further increasing trust in your body’s responses. 

How does somatic therapy reconnect you with your body?

Therapists who emphasize talk therapy generally focus on the mind and changing thoughts and beliefs. This involves telling the story, but the part of your brain that remembers the story isn’t connected to the part of the brain, nervous system, and tissues where the trauma actually lives. 

I explain to clients that old traumas that haven’t been healed are like tiny frozen time capsules that get triggered by current events. Unttil you thaw out and release the frozen trauma, it causes disruptions in everything, including your mood, sleep, digestion, how you respond to people and events, and all levels of well-being.

Somatic therapists work with the nervous system, which includes the emotional and primal parts of the brain to improve connection to the body, increase bodily awareness, and support deep healing and transformation. Where trauma gets stored isn’t rational, logical, or linear. It’s stored in memory networks and accessed, not through talking about it, but through experiencing body-felt sensations.

Somatic therapy accesses the traumatic events stored in your nervous system and tissues, which helps your body safely release the trauma imprints, even if you don’t remember what happened. This occurs through placing focused awareness on body sensations (or lack of sensations, including places of numbness or disconnection). 

When you disconnect from your body, you lose awareness of the body’s subtle cues, including thirst, hunger, emotional feelings, and bodily sensations. Somatic therapy brings your focus inward, inviting you to notice, to be present with, and to begin to feel again, increasing your connection and internal awareness. 

For example, when you have anxiety, a somatic therapist may guide you to focus on the sensations of your breathing, the tightness in your neck, jaw, or back, or the clenching in your stomach. They may ask you to place a hand on your heart, another hand on your belly, and tune into the sensation of breathing. Is your breathing shallow or deep? Where is your breath catching? 

Slowing down and being present also allows you to become present to other bodily sensations, such as a cold ropy tension in your forearms, cramping heat in your neck, a feeling of someone pressing down with a heavy weight, or prickly twisty cramping tightness in your lower belly. 

From a somatic perspective, your body’s way of asking for support is through sensation. Good sensations are your body’s way of saying things are going well. Uncomfortable or painful sensations are your body’s SOS signal, asking for your attention and help.

A skilled therapist will support you to become present, feel safe to feel again by staying within what’s called your window of tolerance, build safety and resourcing in your nervous system, which increases the ability to feel even more, fostering resilience, which helps move the trauma out of your nervous system. 

Getting in touch with your body’s sensations and the underlying emotions can feel overwhelming, scary, and unsafe. A somatic therapist will help you build resources and support you to feel through the scary parts, which helps you restore safety and resilience in your body, emotions, and nervous system.

Over time, you will begin to trust your body and regain confidence in the ways your body responds to your emotions and environment.

Benefits of Somatic Therapy 

Somatic Therapy has many benefits, including reduced physical and emotional discomfort and distress and a strengthened connection between the mind and body. Other benefits include improved ability to experience physical sensations, improved ability to feel internal body cues, such as tightness, hunger, and thirst (also called interoception), improved sleep and digestion, decreased anxiety and depression symptoms, improved mood, improved communication and interpersonal skills, and an overall improved sense of peace, harmony, well-being, and sense of thriving.

If you’ve never worked with a somatic therapist and want to explore how somatic therapy might support you to heal the unresolved trauma living in your nervous system, reach out to schedule a free consultation. consultation

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