What Is Somatic Psychotherapy

Somatic psychotherapy has roots going back to Wilhelm Reich, an early student of Freud who broke with the psychoanalytic tradition to bring the body into the consulting room. What followed over the next century was a diverse and sometimes contradictory set of approaches, many drawing from movement traditions, martial arts, and bodywork practices from around the world. The field is rich and contested. What these approaches share is a conviction that the body is central to psychological life.

Somatic psychotherapy integrates current research in neuroscience, body awareness practices from both Eastern and Western cultures, and aspects of Gestalt, Psychodynamic, Relational, and Humanistic therapy traditions. It works with the whole person: body and mind, thinking, feeling, and sensing. This means that at times the focus will be on your experience in the moment rather than on the content of a particular past or present stressor.

In addition to exploring thoughts and feelings, as would happen in any therapy, a somatic psychotherapist might also help you explore gestures, bodily tension, and particular sensations through mindful awareness or movement.

Somatic psychotherapy is more than a set of techniques. It is a way of thinking that sees your psyche as fundamentally embodied. Our early history, before we acquire language and the capacity for explicit memories, has a huge impact on us. What we learned about the world and our place in it during those early years is stored in implicit, procedural memory. It shapes how we move, how we breathe, how we respond to other people, often without our awareness. Somatic psychotherapy is particularly useful in working with this layer of experience.

How I Work

I incorporate somatic approaches carefully, with your permission, in the context of longer term relational psychotherapy. Often they arise organically from what you are already working on rather than being something I prescribe or impose. They are often simple, and can be quite powerful.

Some of the questions that might come up in our work together: Are you cut off from particular emotions, and where does that cutoff show up in your body? Are you overwhelmed by particular emotions, and how might you learn to relate to those sensations differently? Are there places of tension or holding in your body that connect to past experiences or current difficulties? In your family and culture, how did you have to inhibit or accentuate your body's natural responses in order to get the care you needed?

Over time I have come to describe my work as embodied relational rather than somatic. Practitioners who focus heavily on technique and on "the body" as a separate domain can end up missing the whole person and the relationship between therapist and client, which is where the most important work happens. We are not a mind that has a body. We are a bodymind, and that reality is only fully met in the relational field.

Originally published 2013 at wellclinic.com. Lightly updated April 2026