Letting the Body Lead

The Power of Somatics in Therapy

When we think about the most critical first steps in therapy, our minds often jump to assessment tools, coping strategies, or building rapport. But what if the most transformative starting point is the body itself?

In somatic therapy, we don't just acknowledge the body's role—we make it the leader of the process.

Why Start with the Body?

Before learning to let the body lead, I felt constant pressure as a therapist to decide what to focus on and what modality would be best. Often, I would begin a treatment plan with a client only to find ourselves hitting walls when my client would struggle to access or articulate their inner experiences. I quickly learned that when I felt lost or ineffective in sessions, it was often because I was trying to think my way through a process that demanded something deeper—something more embodied.

This realization set me on a years-long journey of exploring somatics, a field where the body isn’t just included—it’s the leader. And what I discovered felt like finding the answers that not only made intuitive sense but immediately invited me to shift how I was focusing the therapeutic work.

Defining Somatics in a Clinical Context

At its core, somatics invites us to redefine key concepts like self-awareness and embodiment. Rather than understanding these through intellectual analysis, we begin to see them through the lens of lived, bodily experience. This is a profound shift—from thinking about our experience to actually feeling it. Often we are seeking embodied experiences for us or our clients, only to find the process getting stuck in thought, analysis, or intellectualization. It is difficult to shift our focus to the literal, cellular body processes because we have so little practice or understanding of how to be with this level of experiencing.

Affect Phobia: The Hidden Barrier

One key concept in somatic work is affect phobia—a resistance or fear of feeling our own emotional and physical sensations. In lay terms, I often refer to this as a "feelings phobia” when speaking to clients.

Affect is more than just emotion; it includes bodily sensations and the meanings we attach to them. When clients fear their affective experiences, they often become stuck in therapy, unable to move forward despite their desire. And here's the thing: we can’t think our way out of this. We must feel our way through it—safely, gradually, and with support. As therapists, we need to be able to guide our clients through a steady but potent process of opening up their awareness to the present moment happenings of the body and allowing the energy of the moment to move through them without suppression or dissociation. We have to be able to feel it all in order to heal. We can’t bypass the body and think our way into healing.

Listening to the Body's Language

The body communicates constantly, often through symptoms: chronic pain, inflammation, fatigue, digestive issues, and more. These aren’t just medical phenomena; they’re messages.

Whether we’re hearing our clients talk about migraines, IBS, or fertility struggles, these symptoms deserve a place in our clinical conceptualizations. When we learn to interpret them with humility and care, we gain powerful insights into our clients’ inner worlds. They are messages telling us where and how they may have had to suppress and hide intolerable emotions and sensations in their past.

Building a Relationship with the Experiencing Self

One of the most practical and impactful skills we can develop is helping clients build a conscious relationship with their own bodily experience. This “experiencing self” becomes a guide—not just to understanding what’s wrong, but to knowing what’s needed.

When the body sets the goals, and when we truly listen, therapy becomes not just effective, but energetically efficient. The body doesn’t lie—but it does speak a different language. Learning to hear and honor that language is where this efficiency can happen.

The Role of Embodied Presence

As therapists, our own embodied presence is a vital part of this process. Somatic work isn't something we do to clients; it's something we transmit through our way of being. It’s not about mastery—it's about commitment to being present, congruent, and attuned to the happenings of our own body.

This is where lineage and mentorship come in. In somatics, learning is often passed through relationship, not just through books or theories. We are shaped by our teachers, and in turn, we shape our clients—not just through what we say, but through how we are. The presence of an embodied teacher invites our bodies into the present moment in a way that an idea rarely can. The feeling of them creates a feeling of us in our awareness. Not so we can become like them, but so we can find ourselves.

To work somatically is to invite a deeper, more authentic kind of transformation—one that begins in the body and ripples outward. It asks us to slow down, tune in, and trust the wisdom that lives beneath words.

If you're a clinician feeling stuck, or if you're simply curious about how to bring more depth into your work, consider this: the body is already speaking. The question is—do we know how to listen?

If you’d like to deepen your knowledge and become fully trained in SomatoSymbolic Processing Therapy join the waitlist for the Fall Cohort. Registration is opening in just a couple weeks!

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