Somatic Work

Your body has been paying attention long before your mind had the words for what was happening. It registered the tension in the room before anyone raised their voice. It learned to hold still when holding still meant safety. It tightened, braced, collapsed, went numb; it was doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you.

Somatic work is therapy that recognizes that trauma, stress, grief, and oppression don’t just live in your thoughts — they live in your nervous system, your muscles, your breath, your posture, the way you carry yourself through a room. You can understand something intellectually and still feel it stuck in your chest. You can know you’re safe now and still flinch. That gap between what you know and what your body believes is where somatic work lives.

Why the body matters in this work

Western psychology has historically treated the body as separate from the mind; something to manage, medicate, or override. But for many of us, especially those from communities that have experienced generational trauma, colonization, forced migration, and systemic violence, the body is where the story is most honestly told.

Your body carries what your family couldn’t speak about. These are not symptoms to be eliminated. They are communications from a body that has been working overtime to keep you alive in a world that has not always been safe.

For Black, Indigenous, and people of color, reconnecting with the body is also an act of reclamation. Colonialism and white supremacy have a long history of severing people from their bodies — through forced labor, medical experimentation, policing, the criminalization of rest, and the pathologizing of non-Western ways of moving, healing, and being. Somatic work, when practiced through an anti-oppressive lens, is about returning to a relationship with your body that these systems tried to take from you. It is, as we believe at MLC, part of liberation work.

What somatic work actually looks like in session

Somatic work isn’t one technique; it’s a way of paying attention. In session, your therapist might invite you to notice what’s happening in your body as you talk about something difficult. Where do you feel it? What’s the texture, the temperature, the weight? Does it move or stay still? This isn’t about analyzing or fixing the sensation, it’s about listening to it.

Depending on what feels right for you, somatic work at MLC might include:

• Noticing and tracking physical sensations as they arise in conversation; tightness in your throat, heat in your chest, numbness in your hands  and using that information as a guide rather than something to push past
• Breathwork that isn’t about “calming down” on command, but about building a relationship with your breath as a resource your body can return to when it’s ready
• Grounding practices that help your nervous system recognize safety in the present moment; particularly useful if your body is still responding to threats that are no longer here
• Gentle movement or stillness; whatever your body needs, to allow incomplete survival responses to surface and complete themselves at a pace that doesn’t overwhelm you
• Building awareness of the window of tolerance; understanding when your nervous system is activated (fight/flight) or shut down (freeze/collapse) and developing the capacity to come back to a regulated state without forcing it

Somatic work is about helping your body process what it’s been holding so that you can move through your life with more ease, more presence, and more choice about how you respond to the world around you.

Who this is for

Somatic work can be helpful for anyone, but it’s especially relevant if you’ve noticed that talk therapy alone hasn’t been enough; if you can narrate your story clearly but your body still reacts as though the danger is present. It’s also deeply supportive for people whose trauma is preverbal, intergenerational, or rooted in chronic systemic stress rather than a single event.

If your body has been dismissed, controlled, surveilled, or harmed by systems or people who had power over you, somatic work is an invitation to come back into relationship with it on your own terms. Slowly. Gently. With someone who understands that your body’s responses are not dysfunction, they are evidence of what you’ve survived and what you’re still carrying.