Trauma-informed Somatic Therapy

Trauma-informed Somatic Therapy

Trauma-informed Somatic therapy is a nervous system and body-based approach to conventional talking therapy. Sessions are formatted to support you in building a greater awareness and relationship with your body and the messages that it is trying to tell you, whilst also engaging in talking therapy.

Somatic therapy sessions include some psychoeducation to help you to better understand how to work with your body to relieve anxiety, work with depression and use a nervous system lens to empower you to manage your own mental and emotional well-being moving forwards.

Being trauma-informed, it does this with compassion and understanding for the wider societal conditions within which you live.

Somatic therapy works on the understanding that we cannot always put words to what we have experienced or that sometimes we cannot always remember fully what has happened to us.

But our bodies remember and often, through our bodies, can we find the deepest relief to our challenges. It also works on the premise that sometimes talking about what we’ve experienced can be re-traumatising and that focussing on gentle body-based movements and the co-regulation offered in therapy can be enough to move things.

It offers a way to work through anything we may be carrying with more nuance, trusting in the messages and wisdom that come through our bodies.

For some people, deeper processing may be needed, and so somatic therapy also includes bilateral processing and parts work amongst other processing modalities to help to work with the more deeply embedded challenges. This is usually done only after a period of creating more safety within the body.