You can understand perfectly well why you feel anxious. You can have a brilliant analysis of your childhood, your patterns, what's happening to you. And still, your body keeps reacting as if nothing had changed.
That's not a failure of understanding: it's a signal that the body needs to take part in the process.
What is somatic work?
Somatic work (from the Greek "soma", body) is any therapeutic approach that integrates bodily experience as a gateway to emotional material and as a resource for regulation. It's not massage, not exercise, not relaxation — it's conscious attention to what your body is communicating and how you can work with it.
The premise is simple: emotional experiences, especially difficult ones, aren't stored only as thoughts or memories. They're also stored as bodily patterns: chronic tension, defensive postures, breathing patterns, physiological reactivity.
Why the body?
Because the autonomic nervous system operates from the body, not from the rational mind. Sympathetic activation (fight or flight) and dorsal shutdown (disconnection) are bodily responses. If you only work through conversation and analysis, you're leaving out half the system.
Authors like Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing), Pat Ogden (sensorimotor psychotherapy) and Stephen Porges (polyvagal theory) have shown that working with the body is essential for trauma resolution and long-term emotional regulation.
What is it like in session?
Somatic work in session can include several elements, always adapted to what you need and at your pace:
- Body tracking: paying attention to physical sensations while you talk about something emotionally charged. "Where do you feel that in your body? What's it like? Does it have a shape, a temperature, a movement?"
- Breath regulation: using the breath as a tool to regulate nervous activation in real time.
- Work with posture and movement: exploring how certain postures reflect emotional states and how changing posture can shift internal experience.
- Sensory orientation: using the senses to reconnect with the present when activation threatens to overwhelm you.
The body isn't an obstacle to the process: it's an ally that's been trying to tell you something for years.
You don't need to be "a body person"
Many people arrive with the idea that they're not good at "feeling the body" or that connecting with sensations is hard for them. That's perfectly normal, especially if you've spent years dissociating from bodily experience as a form of protection.
Somatic work doesn't require any prior skill. It starts exactly where you are, even if that place is "I don't feel anything." Not feeling anything is already valuable information about your nervous system's state.
Somatic work within an integrative approach
In my practice, somatic work integrates with IFS (parts express themselves in the body), EMDR (processing includes the bodily dimension) and Gestalt (where the body is always part of present experience). It's not a separate technique but a dimension that runs through the whole process.
If you feel you understand what's happening to you but your body hasn't "received the memo", somatic work may be the missing piece.