As someone who has experienced multiple traumas, including childhood sexual abuse, I spent around six years in therapy with a wonderful psychodynamic psychotherapist. I thought my Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) had passed. However, after a while, I noticed I still had strong adverse bodily sensations to certain smells or the appearance of certain men. My brain knew rationally that I was safe, so what was happening to me?
I found myself asking my partner not to wear certain deodorants or aftershaves because I would feel sick, or even be physically sick. I had to stop using certain air fresheners, and I was feeling increasingly triggered when out in public. After doing some research, I realised my body was still in active trauma. My brain had done the work, but my nervous system had not.
That was the point when I started training in Somatic Resilience, and it has changed how I think and work in every client session I run. I also stepped back into therapy, but this time with a somatic therapist.
The body remembers what the story leaves out.
Here is something that took experiencing it myself to truly realise: trauma is not only stored as a memory, it is stored as a nervous system state. This is the whole premise of somatic work, coming largely from Peter Levine’s observations of animals in the wild. A gazelle that barely escapes a predator will tremble and shake for a few minutes, then go back to grazing, completely reset. It discharges the physical activation instead of storing it.
Levine’s argument is one I have come to trust deeply through my own therapy and clinical practice. We do the exact same thing under threat, except our thinking brain intervenes and shuts the discharge down before it finishes. That activation does not disappear; it gets filed away in the body, where the spoken word cannot reach it directly.
So, What Happens in a Somatic Client Session?
People often imagine somatic therapy is either massage-adjacent or vaguely mystical, but it is neither. A typical session with me involves a lot of pausing. Someone might be telling me something, and I will ask them to stop mid-sentence and simply notice what is happening in their chest right at that moment, or where their breath just went. The goal is not to interpret it, but to notice it out loud together.
Sometimes we work with a physical movement that got interrupted:
- I worked with a client whose whole body wanted to turn and run every time they talked about a specific person.
- We spent several sessions letting their legs actually complete that running motion, slowly and safely in the room.
- While it sounds simple written down, it was a profound thing to witness.
I want to be clear: I do not tell people what their bodies mean. A clenched jaw is not a universal symbol for any single emotion. My job is to be curious about that specific pattern in that specific person, rather than running their sensations through a generic template learnt in a weekend workshop.
Why Somatic Work Does Not Replace Talk Therapy
I still talk to my clients a lot. Language matters, context matters, and understanding your own history matters. However, I no longer believe that intellectual understanding is sufficient on its own, and I am honest with new clients about that on day one.
If you have been in talk therapy for years and can explain your patterns easily, yet still feel the old physical reaction before you can stop it, somatic work addresses that exact gap. It is also for those who describe awful trauma as casually as if they were telling someone they popped to the shops, with no physical reaction at all. Somatic therapy is not “smarter” than talk therapy; it is exploring a different question.
Who Would Benefit from Somatic Resilience Therapy?
Somatic therapy is particularly helpful for:
- People who feel stuck: Those who have done real work in talk therapy but feel stuck at the edge of it.
- Pre-verbal trauma: Individuals whose trauma happened before they had language for it, where there is no clean narrative because the events predate the storytelling part of the brain.
- Disconnection from the body: Clients who feel like they do not live in their body, a common form of disconnection after chronic stress.
- Active dissociation: People using dissociation as an active coping strategy.
Diving into bodily sensations with someone who is dissociating to survive their week needs to be handled carefully by a specifically trained somatic therapist. Good somatic practitioners know the difference between titrating someone towards more embodiment versus flooding them with sensations they are not resourced to handle.
Somatic work, done poorly, can genuinely retraumatise someone. Having a therapist with proper, comprehensive somatic training is essential, not just someone who lists “mind-body” in their bio.
Not every session will feel dramatic. Some are almost entirely silent with gentle breathwork. Other sessions achieve more in ten minutes than months of talking therapy managed. Even years into practice, I cannot always predict which type of session a given day will be, and I have made peace with that.
Get in Touch
If you would like to work with someone who understands trauma and want to begin your somatic journey, please contact me here to get started.