Somatic Therapy: How It Helps You Move Through Trauma
Have you been through something overwhelming? A car accident, an invasive medical procedure, the sudden loss of someone you loved, or a childhood marked by abuse that still shapes how you relate to people today?
Moving through any of this is not simple. These experiences can leave you seeing the world as a dangerous place, feeling anxious, irritable, or on constant alert. Or they can leave you numb, shut down, and quietly ashamed. You might feel disconnected from the people closest to you, or reactive in ways that surprise you. Memories and images can arrive uninvited. Sometimes it can feel like a different “part” of you shows up and responds to a situation in a way you didn’t choose and don’t recognize.
If you’ve lived with trauma symptoms like these, you already know they don’t stay in your mind. Trauma settles into the body and into the emotional centers of the brain, and it affects mental health in ways that go beyond what talking alone can address. It isn’t defined by the type of event that caused it, and it doesn’t live only in thoughts or memories. It often shows up as chronic stress, tension, or a felt sense of disconnection from yourself and the people around you.
It can be hard to know where to even begin. This is where somatic therapy comes in.
Not the Same as Physical Therapy
Somatic therapy is sometimes confused with physical therapy, since both work directly with the body. Physical therapy addresses the body’s mechanics: strength, mobility, and recovery from injury. Somatic therapy, also called body psychotherapy or somatic psychology, works with the body as a way of understanding and processing emotional experience. It’s a body centered form of therapy, not a form of physical rehabilitation.
What Is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy starts from the understanding that emotions and experiences don’t live only in the mind. Have you noticed your shoulders tighten before a hard meeting, or your stomach tense before a difficult conversation? Even our facial expressions can shift without us noticing, tightening around the eyes or jaw when something feels unsafe. These are small signs of your body registering emotional stress in real time.
In somatic therapy, you and your therapist gently explore the connection between your thoughts, your emotions, the sensations in your body, and the impulses toward movement that often go unnoticed. This mind-body connection is central to how the work unfolds. The focus isn’t on applying a technique for its own sake. It emerges from what’s present for you, in the room, in that moment.
Why Trauma Lives in the Body
When we experience trauma, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher order thinking, can go offline, and the nervous system shifts into survival mode. That might look like fighting, fleeing, freezing, or collapsing. These responses exist to protect us, and they can remain switched on long after the danger has passed. The nervous system can get stuck in a state of high alert or a state of shutdown, when what it’s reaching for is something closer to balance, sometimes called a window of tolerance.
Left unaddressed, this ongoing activation can show up as chronic pain or tension, digestive trouble, sleep that doesn’t come easily, or a sense of feeling either numb or easily overwhelmed. These bodily sensations are often the clearest signal that something needs attention, even before the mind has caught up.
Where Somatic Therapy Comes From: Peter Levine, Pat Ogden, and Decades of Research
Somatic approaches to trauma have been developing for more than four decades, at the multidisciplinary intersection of medical biophysics, contemplative practices, indigenous healing practices, and close observation of how animals in the wild recover from threat without becoming stuck in it.
Peter Levine’s life’s work in this area led to Somatic Experiencing, one of the earlier body-based approaches to trauma. Pat Ogden, drawing in part from her background in dance movement therapy, went on to develop Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, the approach I practice. People come to this field from multiple professions, including psychology, medicine, and movement-based disciplines, and the way any two practitioners work can vary widely, even when they’re drawing on similar research.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Other Somatic Modalities
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a mindful, body-based somatic modality, clinically applied in professional settings by trained therapists. It tends to move in phases: first, building safety and a sense of steadiness in the nervous system, sometimes through grounding practices or guided meditation; then, working through traumatic memory, whether from a single incident or something that unfolded over time as developmental trauma; and eventually, attending to how relationships and long-held beliefs have been shaped by past negative experiences.
Pacing matters a great deal in this work. How much intensity to bring into a session, and when, is calibrated to what you can actually tolerate in the moment, not rushed toward a goal. At its core, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy treats the body as a source of information, not just a symptom to manage. It draws on somatic, emotional, and cognitive processing together, rather than treating any one of those as separate from the others.
You can read more about Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and find answers to common questions at sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org.
What People Often Notice Over Time
Everyone’s experience in this work is different, and I don’t make promises about outcomes. Research into somatic therapies is still developing, and the evidence base for some approaches is less established than for more studied modalities like CBT. For that reason, somatic therapy is often used alongside, rather than in place of, other evidence-based treatments.
That said, there are patterns people often describe. Some find they can access emotions that were hard to reach through words alone, since the body sometimes holds what language can’t quite name. Others notice their stress response settling into a more relaxed state, with more room to breathe between one moment and the next. Some describe a shift in mood as they become more aware of what’s happening in their body, moment to moment. And for many, the work touches how they relate to others: trauma and other stress disorders can make closeness feel unsafe, and this kind of attention to the body can make room for connection again, at whatever pace feels right.
Looking for a Trauma Therapist in the Bay Area
There are many skilled trauma therapists in the Bay Area, and finding the right fit matters more than finding the most credentialed name on a list.
It’s worth looking for someone who specifically names trauma and somatic work in how they describe their practice, rather than listing it as one of many specialties. It’s also worth asking directly about their approach: what do somatic therapy sessions actually look like with this person, and does that match what you’re looking for? Licensing and additional training in trauma informed or somatic modalities are worth confirming, and directories like Psychology Today, along with recommendations from people you trust, can be a reasonable starting point.
Underneath all of that, the more important question is a felt one. In an initial conversation, do you feel safe? Do you feel heard? That sense of fit, and your own understanding of what you need, tends to matter more than anything on paper. Clients often say this is the thing they wish they’d trusted sooner.
A Bit About My Practice
My name is Michelle, and I’m a licensed trauma therapist providing somatic therapy in San Rafael, CA, and online for California residents. I work primarily with Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a mindful, body-focused approach to trauma.
If you’re curious whether this kind of work might be a fit for you, there’s no pressure to decide anything ahead of time. It’s simply a chance to talk and see if it feels right.