The body keeps the score. This is not just the title of Bessel van der Kolk’s landmark book on trauma – it is a fundamental truth about how human beings store experience. The mind may forget or suppress traumatic events. The body does not. It holds them in chronic tension, disrupted nervous system responses, posture, breath, and the thousand small ways it braces for threats that are no longer present.
Somatic healing is the practice of working directly with the body to release what has been stored – addressing trauma, stress, and emotional pain at the level where it is most deeply held.
Why Talk Therapy Alone Is Sometimes Not Enough
Conventional talk therapy works primarily through the cognitive brain – the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rational thought, narrative, and conscious processing. This is valuable. But trauma is not primarily stored in the cognitive brain. It is stored in the limbic system and the brainstem – the older, more primitive structures that govern threat response, emotion, and survival instinct.
These structures do not respond to insight and narrative the way the cognitive brain does. A person can understand intellectually why they have a particular reaction, can trace its origin to a specific experience, can articulate the pattern fluently – and still have the body respond as if the original threat is present. Somatic healing addresses what talk therapy alone cannot reach.
What Somatic Healing Involves
Somatic healing begins with developing the capacity to notice what is happening in the body – to feel sensation, track movement, and recognise the physical signatures of different emotional and nervous system states. This sounds simple. For many people who have learned to disconnect from physical sensation as a way of managing overwhelming experience, it is a significant practice in itself.
From that foundation, somatic work helps the nervous system complete processes that were interrupted by trauma – the fight-or-flight responses that were activated but never discharged, the grief that was suppressed, the boundaries that were violated. This completion is not re-traumatisation. Done with skill and care, it is liberation – the body finally getting to do what it needed to do, and in doing so, releasing the energy that has been held in chronic activation.
Somatic Practices You Can Begin Today
Body scanning – bringing gentle, curious attention slowly through the body from feet to head, noticing sensation without trying to change it – develops the foundational capacity for somatic awareness. Even five minutes daily builds significant capacity over time.
Orienting – slowly turning the head and eyes to take in the environment, noticing what is present and safe – activates the social engagement system and helps the nervous system register that the current moment is different from threatening past experiences.
Pendulation – consciously moving attention between a place of ease or resource in the body and a place of activation or discomfort – builds the nervous system’s capacity to tolerate difficult sensation without being overwhelmed by it.
TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises) – a series of exercises that induce the body’s natural tremor mechanism, which research suggests is the body’s way of discharging held tension – is a self-directed somatic practice that many people find profoundly releasing.
The Transformation That Becomes Possible
When the body releases what it has been holding, something fundamental shifts. The chronic vigilance softens. The capacity for joy and pleasure that trauma suppresses begins to return. The physical vitality that has been diverted into managing held tension becomes available for living. People who have done sustained somatic work often describe feeling more alive than they have in years – or for the first time in their lives. That aliveness is not new. It is original. It was always there beneath what was covering it.