The Body Keeps the Score, But What Do You Do About It?

If you've read Bessel van der Kolk's book, or even just seen the title circulating online, you probably already know the central idea: trauma lives in the body, not just the mind. It's become one of those phrases that almost everyone nods at now. The body keeps the score. Yes. Okay. But then what?

That's the question I hear most often from the people who come to me. They've absorbed the concept. They know, intellectually, that their chronic tension, their emotional numbness, their exhaustion, their inability to relax, are connected to what happened to them. They get it. But knowing that trauma is stored in the body doesn't automatically tell you how to work with it. And a lot of people are left holding this awareness without knowing what the next step actually looks like.

Why Reading About It Isn't the Same as Doing It

There's a particular kind of frustration that comes with being well-informed about your own suffering. You've read the trauma books. You follow the therapists on Instagram. You can explain the polyvagal theory to your friends. And you're still waking up at 3am with your jaw clenched and your heart racing for no clear reason.

This makes sense when you understand how the nervous system actually works. The part of your brain that reads and understands concepts is not the same part that holds trauma responses. Your prefrontal cortex can learn that you're safe now. But your brainstem, your vagus nerve, the deep survival circuitry that developed before language, those systems don't respond to information. They respond to experience.

This is why you can't think your way to regulation. You have to feel your way there. And that's a different kind of work.

What Somatic Therapy Actually Is

Somatic therapy is the broad term for therapeutic approaches that work with the body, not just the mind. It's not one specific technique. It includes things like tracking body sensations, working with breath, noticing movement impulses, paying attention to where tension lives and what it's holding. The aim is to help your nervous system complete stress responses that got stuck, release survival energy that's been frozen in your tissues, and gradually expand your capacity to be present in your own body.

In practical terms, a somatic therapy session might look like this: you're talking about something that happened at work, and I notice your shoulders are up around your ears. I might invite you to pause and notice that. Not to fix it or force it to change, but just to be with it. To let your awareness drop into your body for a moment. Sometimes that's enough to start a shift. Sometimes what follows is a deep breath, or a wave of emotion, or a memory, or simply a softening that your body has been waiting to do for years.

It's slow work. That's on purpose. The nervous system interprets rushing as danger. When we go slowly, we're communicating safety to the parts of you that have been on high alert for a long time.

What Changes When the Body Is Included

People often describe the shift in somatic therapy as feeling more like themselves. Not a different person. Just more present, more connected, more available to their own life. The things that used to overwhelm them still happen, but there's a little more space around them. The reactions that used to be automatic start to have a beat of choice in them.

You might notice that you sleep better. That your stomach settles. That you don't brace as hard when your phone rings. That you can feel sadness without spiraling, or anger without shutting down. These changes are often subtle at first. They build over time as your nervous system learns, through repeated experience, that it's allowed to come down from high alert.

Who This Is For

Somatic therapy is especially effective for people dealing with complex trauma, developmental trauma, childhood emotional neglect, chronic stress, dissociation, and emotional numbness. If you're someone who has done a lot of talk therapy and found it helpful but incomplete, if you understand your patterns but can't seem to change them at the body level, if you feel disconnected from your own physical experience, this approach might be the missing piece.

It's also for people who feel too much. If you're chronically overwhelmed, easily flooded by emotion, or find yourself swinging between intense feeling and total shutdown, somatic work can help you build a wider window for what your system can hold.

What to Do Next

If the idea of working with the body resonates but you're not sure what it would look like for you specifically, I offer a free 20-minute consultation. It's just a conversation. We talk about what's going on, I share a bit about how I work, and we see if it feels like a fit. No pressure, no performance required.