Somatic Therapy: Definition, Examples, & Exercises

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph. D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Learn the definition of somatic therapy, its most common types and techniques, and how somatic therapy can help you and the people you love.
*This page may include affiliate links; that means we earn from qualifying purchases of products.

Think about the techniques for healing our bodies and minds that we most commonly see and experience. Physical issues, such as a strained leg or tension in one’s back, might be treated by massage or seeing a physical therapist. We try to talk out our mental health challenges – or maybe just take a pill first, to see how far that takes us. These healing techniques are often very specialized and delivered in just one way.​
Many of our experiences in healing treat our mind and body like they are separate entities. The tradition of seeing things this way is called Cartesian dualism, named after the French philosopher, Rene Descartes, who thought our minds had no physical form and were therefore completely separate from our physical bodies (Descartes, 1993).

Although this dualism has guided scientific and medical thinking for many years, in the last several decades, more and more healthcare providers have recognized that healing the mind and healing the body are in fact closely connected or overlapping tasks. Some of these providers use somatic therapy to treat the mind and body at the same time, helping both heal simultaneously. Read on to learn the definition of somatic therapy, its most common types and their techniques and exercises, and how somatic therapy can help you and the people you love.
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What Is Somatic Therapy? (A Definition)

Somatic therapy seeks to heal people by helping them perceive how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are connected to their physiological experiences. Using activities that focus on naming and understanding bodily sensations – and relating them to the thoughts and feelings one is experiencing – somatic therapy puts what is happening in the body front and center, as the starting place for learning about and understanding the rest of one’s experience (Heller, 2012).

The Greek word soma means “body”, highlighting just how central the body is to somatic therapy. Putting the body first is a radical idea since we usually step outside of ourselves to observe our bodies (Hanna, 1970). If I’m trembling backstage, waiting for my turn to sing at a talent show, I might say to myself, “I’m so nervous that I’m shaking”, as if my feelings caused my body to behave that way. To a somatic therapist, changing my anxiety in that moment would require paying attention to, and then doing something to change, not just my mind but my body as well.

As a long-distance runner, I spent many nights before college track meets thinking about the next day’s race. Lying in bed and imagining the race, I would experience the same physiological changes that happened just before the gun went off: tension would fill my face and shoulders, heat would pour into my legs, and my hands might even clench.
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While I needed all that adrenaline to run a good race, I didn’t need it to fall asleep! Our bodies carry memories of everything that has happened to us, just like our brains do. Those memories get activated and show up in our bodily experiences every day, just like our mental memories. Somatic therapy heals us by focusing on what those bodily sensations are telling us about our reactions to the moment. What memory is my body reliving? What is this experience of my body telling me I want or need right now?

Somatic Therapy Types

Here are some of the most frequently practiced forms of somatic therapy.

Somatic Experiencing​
Somatic experiencing is a form of therapy originally designed to treat people who have experienced trauma and are experiencing posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD (Levine, 2010). Levine (2010) observed that when people experience upsetting events, they often respond by freezing. The energy that people could have used to respond to the situation in a different way then gets stuck, remaining in the body and being expressed in unhealthy ways, such as anxiety, stress, or illness.

The goal of somatic experiencing is to intentionally enter that state of being frozen, and then find ways of expressing the negative energy – perhaps through bodily movements or shouting or yelling – that feel better and release the energy. Over time, people who practice somatic experiencing learn to respond more effectively (e.g., by releasing that energy in healthy ways) whenever they encounter a new situation that upsets them in this familiar way.

Eye Motion Desensitization and Reprocessing
Eye Motion Desensitization and Reprocessing is usually known by its acronym, EMDR. EMDR is a therapeutic technique where the client talks about upsetting or traumatic experiences to their therapist, while also focusing on an activity or object in the room that isn’t related to their traumatic experience. For example, a client might discuss witnessing a car accident while watching the therapist move their hand back and forth across their field of vision, or while tapping their finger regularly against the arm of their chair.

EMDR appears to work by interrupting the typical physical response we have when we remember traumatic events. Changing our physical response to the memory allows us to change our mental response to the memory, giving us the opportunity to develop more effective ways of thinking about and responding to it.

Hakomi
Hakomi has some similarities to somatic experiencing. Where somatic experiencing focuses on changing reactions to traumatic events, the goal of Hakomi is to gain insight into your existence by remaining in the present moment and being very mindful of your bodily experience. For this to happen, the therapist running the session works hard to establish the expectation that no bodily sensations, thoughts, or feelings are wrong or unacceptable.

In a typical Hakomi session, the therapist might start by noticing aspects of the client’s physical presentation – whether they are slouching, bouncing their fingers, or avoiding eye contact – and then make gentle suggestions about how the client can pay attention to and learn from what their body is doing. Ongoing attention to bodily sensations, choosing to move the body, and sometimes gentle, and consensual touch from the therapist are used to keep the client growing in awareness of how their thoughts, feelings, emotions, and body are interconnected.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Sensorimotor psychotherapy combines Hakomi techniques with knowledge from other domains of psychology, such as attachment theory and therapies that don’t typically prioritize attention to the body, such as cognitive-behavioral therapies. As with somatic experiencing, the goal of sensorimotor psychotherapy is to heal from traumatic events by reliving them in safer and more effective ways, but it places more emphasis on using both traditional therapy techniques and attention to the body.

Somatic Therapy Exercises

Here are a couple of somatic therapy exercises (from somatic experiencing, to be specific) you could try on your own. Try not to rush through any of the steps suggested here for each activity.

Feeling Like Yourself
Put yourself in a comfortable position. Now, bring to mind the most recent period of time when you felt most like yourself. Place yourself in the situation as best you can mentally, recalling all the details you can. Notice how your body feels right now, as you relive this moment. Next, bring to mind another time you felt this way – that you were being yourself, the best version of you possible in the moment. Notice again what is happening in your body as you try to relive that moment. And as you let go of those memories, can you notice any differences in your body that are still present, compared to how you felt before the exercise?

Getting Comfortable
​Settle into a chair. Take in your surroundings and how your body feels in this exact moment. Now, change the positioning of your feel – play around with it until you feel a strong, grounding connection to the floor. Notice how not just the ground, but also the parts of the chair, are supporting you, keeping you upright. Move your body in your chair – be curious and take your time – until you feel as comfortable and stable as possible. Finally, pay attention more to your overall experience. How emotionally and physically comfortable are you in this moment? How can you tell?

Somatic Therapy Example

In the following story of a sample session, based mostly on a somatic experiencing approach, you will find many examples of common somatic therapy techniques.

You arrive at therapy feeling nervous, knowing that today you and your therapist have agreed to revisit the sudden death of your brother in a boating accident. Your therapist first asks a series of questions to build your awareness of your body. She asks you to fully notice where you are tense and where you are not, without judging or trying to change that tension. You tell her that your stomach, shoulders, and jaw feel very tight.

For the next half hour, the therapist has you recall the physical sensations of being in the boat with your brother. She encourages you to remember and relive the intensity of each sensation, and when she senses that you are getting especially upset, she gently guides you back to feeling more relaxed, using relaxation techniques you have practiced together before. As you become more relaxed, she asks you to pay attention to and narrate to her the sequence of events – where you feel less tense first, what changes next, and so on.

At the end of the session, the therapist helps you ground yourself in the present by calling your attention to the sensation of your body in its seat, your feet on the ground, and the firmness of the ground. She then asks you to bring to mind your resources – people and places that make you feel safe and positive – and has you pay attention to how thinking of these things makes your body feel. Finally, you talk about how your body feels now and how you can use all the techniques from this session to regulate yourself, body and mind, when you are upset during the week.
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For more description of what somatic experiencing looks like in practice, I suggest you watch the following video.

Video: What Does a Typical Somatic Experiencing Session Look Like?

Somatic Therapy Massage

As massage involves providing healing touch to the body, it is considered a form of somatic therapy. However, it is important to keep in mind that somatic therapy usually refers to therapy that focuses on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as well.

Somatic therapy incorporates physical touch – but typically not traditional massage techniques – knowing that these techniques have been beneficial for many kinds of health and across many cultures (Hunter & Struve, 1998). Indeed, research tells us that therapies including touch can help treat PTSD (Jain et al., 2012), depression (Stotter et al., 2013), physical pain (So et al., 2008), and generally increase feelings of being supported (Jones & Glover, 2012). At their discretion, and with the consent of their client, somatic therapists may touch the client or encourage the client to engage in self-touch. It is thought that this helps the therapist or client more directly move some of the energy that has been called forth during the therapeutic process (Anderson & Taylor, 2011).

Somatic Therapy for Trauma

As noted above, therapies such as somatic experiencing and sensorimotor psychotherapy were specifically designed to treat trauma. Somatic experiencing is unique among treatments for trauma in its focus on the body. As clients learn physical techniques for regulating their emotions and channeling their released energy into more effective ways of responding, their PTSD symptoms go down (Brom et al., 2017).

Somatic Therapy for Anxiety

We all probably know at least one physical symptom that we are feeling anxious, so it should come as no surprise that somatic therapies are also used to treat anxiety. Multiple studies have shown that participation in somatic therapy lowers people’s anxiety symptoms (Rohricht, 2009; Winblad et al., 2018).

Somatic Therapy Criticism

The chief criticism of somatic therapies is that they have not been as well-researched, or as well empirically-validated, as other therapies (Johnson, 2014). Most research studies testing how effective therapies are have focused on evaluating talk therapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. While somatic therapies do not have as much scientific backing, many, many people report they are powerful and helpful healing experiences, and the research on somatic therapies that does exist suggests they are effective as well.

Articles Related to Somatic Therapy

Want to learn more? Here are some related articles that might be helpful.

Books Related to Somatic Therapy

To keep learning, here are some books to explore:​​

Final Thoughts on Somatic Therapy

For many people, but especially people who have not gotten the results they wanted from pure talk therapy, somatic therapy offers a powerful alternative. I can tell you from my own experiences with forms of somatic therapy that building awareness of my own body – what I’m feeling and what it’s telling me to do – has only helped me progress through my own struggles. I hope you will keep exploring this topic to get a better understanding of which kinds of somatic therapy might be most helpful to you.

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