wHAT IS Somatic Therapy - and how can it help you?
By Naomi Rogers, Creative and Embodied Psychotherapist
If you’ve been scrolling wellness content lately, you’ve probably seen the word “somatic” everywhere. Maybe paired with promises that one hip-opening exercise will heal your trauma, or that an expensive breath-work class will regulate your nervous system. I want to offer something different - an honest, grounded explanation of what somatic therapy actually is, why it works, and what it looks like in practice. Because it isn’t woo-woo, and it also isn’t a hip exercise from tik tok.
My own story
I studied ballet from the age of three. Movement was always part of my life - a language, a discipline, a way of expressing things I couldn’t yet put into words. But it wasn’t until I started my own therapy journey in my early twenties that I realised something uncomfortable: I had spent years treating my body as a machine. Something to push through, to overcome, to use in order to get the results I wanted. Not a home. Not an ecosystem. Not something to actually live through.
It was when I began working with a Somatic Psychotherapist - and exploring practices that centre internal body awareness (like the Grinberg Method, Feldenkrais, and Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing) - that something shifted. For the first time, years of therapy work came out of my head and into my body and lived experience.
I learnt to rest. To breathe. To actually feel the beautiful moments in my life rather than just observe them through a layer of thinking. I discovered my body as a compass - one that tells me what feels right, what feels wrong, when to move toward something and when to move away.
That discovery changed everything. It led me into a career in psychotherapy that I find deeply rewarding, into healthier relationships, and into a more honest and fulfilling creative life. It’s why I do this work.
So what actually is somatic therapy?
The word “somatic” comes from the Greek soma - meaning body. Somatic therapy, also known as Embodied Therapy, is an approach that works with the body alongside the mind, recognising that our emotional experiences, stress responses and trauma don’t just live in our thoughts - they live in our bodies too.
This isn’t a new idea. Long before Western science caught up, indigenous cultures and healing traditions around the world understood the body as central to lived experience and healing - through ritual, movement, breath and community practice. The body as a route to wellbeing isn’t a modern discovery. It’s ancient wisdom that science is only now beginning to validate.
Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, whilst still subject to ongoing scientific debate, has been widely influential in helping clinicians and clients understand how the nervous system responds to threat and safety - and how that response shapes our physical and emotional experience. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing demonstrates how trauma becomes stored in the body as incomplete survival responses, & Bessel van der Kolk’s landmark research - and his book The Body Keeps the Score - shows us that the brain holds onto predictive strategies from our past experiences, and those strategies are carried out in our bodies’ habitual patterns.
In plain terms: the body remembers things the mind has tried to move on from. And talking alone doesn’t always reach them.
What does somatic therapy actually look like in a session?
This is where people are sometimes surprised. Somatic therapy doesn’t mean lying on a mat or doing yoga, or being forced into strange and uncomfortable exercises. In my sessions, it might look like this:
I notice that a client’s shoulders tense every time they talk about a particular person or situation. I reflect that back gently: “I noticed your shoulders just tensed when you said that. Would you be willing to slow down and just notice that for a moment?”
Then we pause, we breathe & we stay with what the body is doing rather than rushing past it.
Over time, clients learn to recognise their own body’s cues - the signals that tell them they’re dysregulated, overwhelmed, or moving into a stress response. A self-hug when they need containment. A deep breath when they notice they’ve been holding. Swaying gently when stillness feels impossible. A hand that wants to push outward when something feels threatening.
They also from building on this process, begin to discover what their authentic “yes” feels like in the body - not just the intellectual agreement, but the felt sense of something being right for them.
Sometimes when a client wants to, and it is clinically appropriate, we also use specific, evidence-based exercises. For example, pendiculation is a technique developed by Peter Levine, which involves gently moving attention between a place of difficulty and a place of calm in the body, which helps the brain learn to process trauma without overwhelm. This teaches the brain it can experience heavy emotions but also move away from them, which helps reduce the body’s trauma response. I may also teach shaking and movement exercises that can help clients learn to discharge stress held in the nervous system, or progressive muscle relaxation helps clients learn ways to enter the ‘rest and digest’ state.
None of this happens randomly. It happens within a carefully held therapeutic relationship, at the client’s pace, with their safety and wellbeing at the centre.
What somatic therapy is NOT
Let me be direct about the thing that frustrates me as a clinician.
Social media has created a culture of quick somatic fixes - “do this exercise to release your trauma,” “open your hips to heal your past.” And while movement and body awareness practices have real value, they are not the same as somatic therapy.
Somatic therapy begins with understanding your patterns, your nervous system, your history. An informed, trained therapist then introduces appropriate, evidence-based practices - at the right time, in the right way, with your safety in mind.
I wrote my MA thesis on the healing power of body awareness in therapy. The evidence is robust. What strikes me, honestly, is how strange it is that we ever believed we could intellectually bypass our bodies and lived experiences, and ‘talk ourselves into wellbeing’ in the first place.
The body has always been keeping the score. Somatic therapy is simply learning to read it.
Who might somatic therapy help?
Somatic approaches can be particularly helpful for people navigating:
Trauma and PTSD
Anxiety and chronic stress
Eating disorders and difficult relationships with the body
PMDD and hormonal mental health
Creative blocks and disconnection from self
A general sense of being stuck, flat or not quite themselves
You don’t need to have a diagnosis or be in crisis. Many of the people I work with simply feel like they’re living from the neck up - and want to find their way back into their full selves.
Ready to find out more?
I offer a free initial video call consultation to explore whether somatic and creative therapy might be right for you.
📍 West Hampstead, London + Online
🔴 redthreadtherapy.co.uk