Somatic Techniques
Somatic techniques are a family of approaches that engage the body directly as part of therapeutic work. They begin from the recognition that what happens to a person does not only live in narrative or memory. It also lives in posture, breath, muscle tension, gesture, the way attention moves through the body, and the patterns the nervous system has learned about safety and threat.
This is not a new insight. Indigenous, Asian, African, and contemplative traditions across the world have understood the body’s role in healing for thousands of years. The contemporary clinical conversation about somatic practice has often drawn on these older traditions, sometimes acknowledging the lineage and sometimes not.
When something overwhelming happens, the body responds before the thinking mind has any say. The nervous system mobilizes to fight or flee, or, when neither is possible, drops into freeze or collapse. These are automatic survival responses, run by older and deeper parts of the brain and body than the parts that handle language and reasoning.
Ordinarily, once the threat passes, the body completes the response and settles. But when the response could not be completed, when there was no way to fight back, no way to escape, no safe person to turn to, the activation can get stuck. The body keeps bracing for a threat that, as far as the nervous system is concerned, was never resolved. This is part of why a person can understand intellectually that they are safe now and still live in a body that has not gotten the message: chronic tension, hypervigilance, a startle that fires too easily, a shutdown that arrives without warning.
This material is held in implicit memory, the body’s record of how things felt and what it had to do to survive, rather than in the kind of memory we can narrate. That is why talk alone often does not reach it. Language engages one set of systems; the held survival activation lives in another. Somatic work engages that other level directly. By slowing down and bringing careful attention to sensation, breath, movement, and impulse, the work gives the stuck activation a path to complete and discharge, so the nervous system can update its sense of what is happening now and gradually reorganize toward safety. This is sometimes called bottom-up processing: working from the body upward, rather than from thought downward.
Several things become possible when the body is included in the work:
- Material that has been stored below the level of language becomes accessible. People can carry experiences that they cannot quite tell as stories but that are clearly present in how their body holds itself. Working with the body can engage this material directly.
- Trauma can be processed at the level it was encoded. Traumatic experience often gets stored in the nervous system in ways that talk does not fully reach. Body-based work can address it where it lives.
- The chronic patterns of bracing, vigilance, or collapse that come with cumulative stress can be worked with directly, rather than only described
- The body’s ongoing intelligence can become a source of information rather than a problem to override. The breath often knows things the conscious mind has not yet caught up to.
- Healing can include pleasure, ease, rest, and reconnection as embodied experiences, not only as concepts
What this work can look like at MLC:
- Slowing down enough to notice what is happening in the body as we talk, including where you feel things, when your breath changes, when something tightens or loosens, when you are present and when you have left the room without realizing it
- Working with breath, orientation, and grounding to help the nervous system find regulation without forcing it
- Engaging with the body’s wisdom about what it needs, often in ways that have been over-ridden for years by the demands of survival, productivity, or social expectation
- Working with chronic patterns of bracing, holding, collapse, or hypervigilance that have outlived the conditions that produced them
- Integrating somatic work with parts work, EMDR, attachment-based work, and other approaches, because the body does not operate in isolation from the rest of the self
- Working with the specific body in front of us, including disability, chronic illness, body size, transness, race, gender, history of sexual violence, and other dimensions, with attention to what would be healing rather than performative
- Honoring the body’s pace. The body cannot be rushed.
The therapists at MLC use somatic approaches because we have seen what becomes possible when the body’s intelligence is included. For many of our clients, including the body has been part of what made therapy actually work, after years of talk-based approaches that did not quite reach what needed reaching.
We bring this work with care for what your body has been through, respect for its pace, and honesty about the traditions this practice draws from. The body has been carrying things and it deserves to be part of the healing.
