Reviewed by Kathryn Vercillo, MA Psychology | Last Updated: December 2025
What Are Somatic Therapies?
Somatic therapies are body based approaches to psychotherapy that recognize emotional experiences, trauma, and stress live not just in the mind but throughout the entire body. These modalities use physical awareness, sensation, movement, and breath as pathways to psychological healing.
Your Body Already Knows Something Your Mind Is Still Working Out
That catch in your throat before difficult conversations. The way your shoulders rise toward your ears when you are stressed. The heaviness in your chest that arrives without obvious cause. These are not random physical events but meaningful communications from a body that has been paying attention all along.
Somatic therapies work with this body intelligence rather than treating physical sensations as mere symptoms to manage. The various approaches we offer share a conviction: lasting healing must include the body, not just the mind that lives in it.
You do not need to choose a specific modality before you begin. Many therapists blend approaches, drawing from multiple traditions based on what serves each client. Some people come knowing they want Brainspotting or Hakomi specifically. Others simply know that body based work appeals to them and find their path through exploration.
Browse our Therapist Directory
On This Page:
- What All Somatic Approaches Share
- Who Seeks Body Based Therapy
- Our Somatic Modalities
- The Flexibility of Somatic Work
- Beginning Your Exploration
What All Somatic Approaches Share
Despite their different techniques, all somatic therapies rest on common ground. Understanding these shared principles helps you recognize whether body based work might suit you, regardless of which specific modality you eventually pursue.
The Body Holds Experience
When you experience something overwhelming, your nervous system responds before your conscious mind catches up. Heart rate shifts. Muscles tense or collapse. Breathing changes. These responses are not secondary to your emotions but part of them, and they can persist long after circumstances change.
Somatic approaches recognize that this held experience must be addressed directly, not just discussed. You might understand perfectly well why you react certain ways, yet the reactions continue because understanding occurs in one part of your brain while the survival responses live in another. Body based work reaches what cognitive insight cannot.
Healing Happens Through Experience
Talking about feeling safe differs from actually feeling safe in your body. Somatic therapies emphasize direct experience over analysis. You do not just learn about regulation; you practice it, building new neural pathways through repeated experience of activation settling, difficulty becoming manageable, and your body discovering it can handle more than it thought.
This experiential focus means sessions often include periods of quiet internal attention, moments of noticing sensation without discussing it, or movement arising spontaneously from the body’s own impulses. The work happens as much in these experiential spaces as in conversation.
Pacing Matters
Somatic therapists track your nervous system state constantly, adjusting the work’s intensity to keep you in a productive range. Moving too fast overwhelms your system and reinforces rather than resolves difficult patterns. Moving too slowly fails to engage the material that needs attention.
This careful pacing distinguishes somatic trauma work from approaches that encourage diving into difficult material. You work at your edge, challenged enough to grow without flooding.
Who Seeks Body Based Therapy
People come to somatic work for many reasons. Some arrive after years of talk therapy that provided valuable insight without fully shifting stuck patterns. Others seek somatic work from the start, intuiting that their healing needs to include the body. Still others discover somatic approaches through yoga, meditation, or bodywork and want to bring that embodied awareness into their psychological healing.
You might consider somatic therapy if:
- Your body carries tension that never fully releases, regardless of exercise, massage, or relaxation techniques.
- Physical symptoms accompany emotional experiences, with your stomach, chest, or muscles responding to stress as reliably as your thoughts do.
- You have gained insight through previous therapy without the felt change you hoped for.
- Trauma symptoms persist in physical form, with triggers producing body responses as much as emotional ones.
- Stillness, quiet, or internal attention appeals to you more than extensive verbal processing.
- You sense that healing needs to happen at a level deeper than words can reach.
Our Somatic Modalities
We offer seven distinct body based approaches. Each provides its own pathway into embodied healing, with different emphases and techniques. Brief descriptions follow; click through for comprehensive information about each.
Somatic Therapy
The broadest umbrella, somatic therapy integrates sensation awareness, breath, movement, and grounding to help process stored experience. This approach teaches practical skills for nervous system regulation that extend into daily life. Many people begin here before exploring more specialized modalities.
Somatic Experiencing Therapy
Developed by Peter Levine, Somatic Experiencing helps complete survival responses interrupted during overwhelming events. Through tracking sensation and supporting natural discharge, SE releases bound energy that has been generating symptoms. Particularly effective for shock trauma, SE also addresses chronic stress, anxiety, and developmental wounds.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing uses bilateral stimulation to help your brain process traumatic memories and disturbing experiences. Through guided eye movements, tapping, or auditory tones, EMDR accesses how distressing material is stored neurologically and supports its integration. One of the most researched trauma treatments available, EMDR follows a structured protocol while working at the body and brain level rather than relying on extensive verbal processing.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting uses specific eye positions to access material stored deep in the brain, bypassing verbal processing to work where trauma actually lives. Developed by David Grand from his EMDR practice, Brainspotting offers a less structured alternative that follows your brain’s natural processing. The approach often produces rapid shifts, appealing to those seeking efficient processing without extensive retelling of difficult experiences.
Hakomi
A mindfulness centered approach, Hakomi uses gentle experiential experiments to access core beliefs shaping your experience. Rather than analyzing problems, you explore present moment responses with curious awareness, discovering patterns you did not know you were following. Hakomi respects your psyche’s own direction toward healing.
Relational Somatic Healing
RSH emphasizes the therapeutic relationship as a primary vehicle for change, recognizing that wounds occurring in relationship often need relational experiences to heal. Drawing from attachment theory and contemplative practices, RSH incorporates breathwork, mindful movement, and sometimes therapeutic touch. Particularly suited for attachment wounds and developmental trauma.
DMT uses creative movement as the primary language for exploration. No dance training is required. Through improvised movement, breath, and rhythm, you access material nonverbally, expressing what words cannot capture. Ideal for those who connect through physical expression or feel constrained by purely verbal therapy.
The Flexibility of Somatic Work
You Need Not Choose Just One
While each modality has its own framework, many therapists integrate elements from several approaches. A session might include Brainspotting to access activated material, SE principles to pace the processing, and grounding techniques from general somatic work to close. This flexibility allows treatment tailored to your needs rather than confined to a single protocol.
If a specific modality appeals to you, seek therapists trained in that approach. If you are uncertain, look for therapists who describe integrative somatic work and are comfortable exploring what resonates as you go.
Modalities Can Complement Each Other
Some clients work with one approach throughout their healing. Others move between modalities as needs evolve. You might begin with EMDR to address specific traumatic memories, then shift to Hakomi for exploring the beliefs that formed around your experiences. Or you might find that Dance Movement Therapy opens expression that deepens your Somatic Experiencing work.
There is no single correct path. Somatic therapies share enough theoretical ground that movement between them feels natural rather than starting over.
Body Based and Talk Approaches Together
Somatic work need not replace talk therapy but can complement it. Some clients see a somatic practitioner for body based processing while continuing with a talk therapist for other concerns. Others work with therapists who integrate somatic awareness into primarily verbal approaches.
The question is not somatic versus cognitive but what combination serves your particular healing.
Beginning Your Exploration
Browsing the Directory
Our therapist directory allows filtering by modality, specialty, and practical factors. When seeking somatic practitioners, look for those listing specific body based approaches. Read how they describe their work, noticing whose language resonates.
If you know you want a particular modality, filter accordingly. If you are exploring broadly, read profiles of therapists offering integrative somatic work who can help you discover what fits.
Initial Conversations
Most therapists offer brief consultations before committing to sessions. Use these conversations to ask about their somatic training and approach. Notice how your body responds during the call. Trust the information your nervous system provides about whether this person feels safe.
Questions worth asking: What somatic training do you have? How do you integrate body based work into sessions? What does early work with you typically look like?
Early Sessions
Whatever modality you begin with, early sessions focus on establishing safety and introducing you to body awareness. You will not be pushed into intense processing before you are ready. Instead, you build foundation: learning to track sensations, understanding your nervous system’s patterns, developing resources you can access when work deepens.
Communicate openly about your experience. If something feels too fast, say so. If you are unsure whether somatic work suits you, discuss that with your therapist. The relationship itself is part of the healing, and honest communication serves it.
For guidance navigating options or questions about our somatic offerings, visit our contact page.