You wake up tired despite a full night’s sleep. Your chest tightens in crowded rooms. A simple everyday sound—laughter, footsteps, a door slamming—feels like a physical threat. You have worked through the memories, cognitive distortions, and behaviors produced by them in talk therapy, so why does your body still flinch? Why are you still on edge?
Trauma doesn’t live solely in the mind. It nests in the body—in tight shoulders, shallow breath, and clenched jaws. It presents as chronic pain. While talk therapy is effective, it rarely addresses the ways in which trauma physically manifests itself. But somatic therapy addresses the mind-body connection.
Why the Body Matters in Healing
A body-centered approach to mental health, somatic therapy recognizes what traditional talk therapy sometimes overlooks: that trauma is also physiological. A traumatic event doesn’t only shape how we think but also how our bodies react, how our nervous system operates, and how we experience physical sensations like pain, tightness, or dissociation. As Harvard Health explains, “the body keeps the score.”
Unlike cognitive approaches that focus solely on thought patterns, somatic trauma therapy helps us listen to and release what the body remembers. Quoting therapist Amanda Baker in this article, Maureen Salamon writes that “somatic therapies posit that our body holds and expresses experiences and emotions, and traumatic events or unresolved emotional issues can become ‘trapped’ inside.”
From tension patterns to traumatic stress responses like fight, flight, or freeze, somatic therapy techniques restore balance and reconnect us to the present moment. While talk therapy offers insight, somatic therapy is more rooted in embodiment.
The 3 Types of Somatic Therapy
There are many types of somatic therapy, but three are better established and more research-supported than the rest: Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and the Hakomi Method. Each helps women recover from trauma symptoms by honoring the body’s role in healing but does so in different ways.
Somatic Experiencing
Most people will first reference somatic experiencing when discussing body-based trauma therapy. Developed by Dr. Peter Levine, Somatic Experiencing therapy focuses on completing what he calls the “interrupted stress cycles” of trauma.
When a person experiences a traumatic event, the nervous system can become stuck in survival mode, a repetitive fight, flight, or freeze cycle. SE helps gently guide individuals out of that “stuckness.” SE uses titration, meaning it works with very small pieces of trauma at a time to avoid overwhelm. It also encourages pendulation, which is gently moving between states of distress and safety to build regulation capacity.
As Theodora Blanchfield writes in an article for Very Well Mind, “Somatic experiencing practitioners use a framework known as SIBAM (Sensation, Imagery, Behavior, Affect, and Meaning) to help clients incorporate their bodies in processing trauma.” Sessions might include tracking body sensations, noticing shifts in breath or posture, or subtly reenacting a movement that was never completed.
This approach is especially helpful for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD symptoms), chronic stress, and trauma that hasn’t responded to traditional talk therapy. A somatic therapist trained in SE will often combine these techniques with tools like breathing exercises, grounding, or eye movement desensitization (EMDR somatic therapy), depending on the client’s needs.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a body-based talk therapy developed by Dr. Pat Ogden in the 1970s. It combines traditional psychotherapy with somatic awareness to treat trauma held in the body, especially dissociative symptoms like numbness, shutdown, or motor inhibition.
Rather than focusing on analyzing narratives, this method encourages clients to notice what’s happening physically as they recall distressing events. Body awareness and identification of physical symptoms tied to emotional pain is key to Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. A therapist might ask, “Where do you feel that in your body?” Through slow, mindful attention, they then help their client explore incomplete movements, which could be impulses that were suppressed during a traumatic event.
By completing these gestures in a safe, guided way, the body can reach a “resolution.” Sensorimotor therapy is especially effective for developmental trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms rooted in early attachment wounds. As Dr. Robert T. Muller writes in an article for Psychology Today, clients commonly address “maternal lack of attunement, as well as acute or gross trauma like sexual abuse, violence, or verbal abuse” through Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. This method is collaborative and consent-driven, which can be empowering for clients who have experienced similar types of trauma.
The Hakomi Method
The Hakomi Method is a mindfulness-based somatic therapy created by Ron Kurtz in the late 1970s. It combines principles from Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism with Western body psychotherapy and systems theory. The Hakomi method is based on several principles, including mindfulness, organicity, unity, body-mind holism, nonviolence, mutability, and truth. The first five were established by Kurtz, while the latter two are sometimes added by other practitioners.
Hakomi places clients in a calm, present-moment state where they can access the unconscious beliefs their bodies have carried. Similar in some ways to Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, the Hakomi Method addresses beliefs often formed through early attachment wounds or developmental trauma.
Rather than analyzing or challenging these beliefs directly, Hakomi therapists create gentle “experiments” to surface them. A therapist might ask, “What happens inside when you hear the words, ‘You are safe here’?” and then guide the client to identify the body’s response. This process reveals unconscious organizing beliefs that shape how the client experiences the world and responds to it.
Sessions are experiential rather than purely verbal. While talk therapy seeks insight, Hakomi seeks transformation through felt experience. It’s particularly helpful for those with relational trauma or unconscious defenses rooted in physical holding patterns. According to the Hakomi Institute, this approach focuses on “providing the missing experience,” one the body needed but never received.
What Happens During Somatic Therapy Sessions
Whether Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Hakomi, or another type of somatic therapy, what makes these sessions different from traditional talk therapy is that they work with the body, not just the mind. This means the therapist helps you tune into how you’re feeling physically, not just what you’re thinking or saying. A somatic therapy session may proceed as follows.
Grounding and Orienting to the Body
These sessions usually start with slowing down. You may be asked to take a breath, feel your feet on the ground, or scan your body for physical sensations like tension, heat, shakiness, numbness, tightness, or movement impulses. This anchors you in the present moment, which is central to most somatic practices.
Tracking Sensations and Emotions
Next, the therapist will help you stay with those physical manifestations to observe them. You might notice your stomach clenching when you recall a traumatic event or that your throat tightens when you talk about a relationship. This is a part of somatic therapy called “interoception.”
Noticing and Completing “Unfinished” Responses
Much of somatic therapy involves helping the body complete trauma responses that were frozen or shut down. Your therapist might help you explore a physical impulse like reaching out, turning your head, bracing your hands and slowly act it out in a safe, contained way.
In Somatic Experiencing, this is called “completing the cycle.” In Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, it might be called “restoring motor responses.” In Hakomi, it could be part of a mindfulness-based “experiment.”
Regulation and Integration
Once you have explored and perhaps released some of this stored energy, the therapist helps you return to baseline through breathing exercises, gentle movement, visualization, or simply noticing how your body feels now compared to the beginning of the session.
How to Know Which Somatic Therapy Might Fit You
Finding the right somatic therapy is less about choosing the “best” method overall and more about choosing the one that resonates most deeply with how your body and mind process trauma. If you feel stuck in stress responses (panic, shutdown, hyper-vigilance), Somatic Experiencing may help release trauma in gentle, nonverbal ways.
If your trauma presents in emotional dysregulation or physical pain without clear memories, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy could help bridge that gap. Last but not least, if you’re interested in the unconscious beliefs behind your trauma responses, the Hakomi Method helps you tease those out.
Resources for Finding Support
Traumatic experiences need not live forever in your body. If you’re interested in working with somatic therapists trained in body psychotherapy or experiential dynamic psychotherapy, you can visit the following resources.
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