Let’s Talk Somatic Therapy
Let’s talk somatic therapy and somatic healing because it’s still somewhat of an enigma in the wellness world (until you’ve finished reading this blog post). My name is Louise Rumball and I spent almost twenty years living with a chronic pain disorder called Fibromyalgia. Doctors told me I’d just have to “manage it” and that there was no real explanation or cure for the unexplainable pain in my body. So I did what I thought you were supposed to do, I ignored it for many years, and then when it became unbearable, I tried every technique, supplement and holistic health technique I could find (from biohacking, to peptides to Ozone therapy, hyperbarix oxygen therapy and more). Finally, I went to talk therapy because I didn’t know where else to turn and I felt so lost and alone. Talk therapy changed my life (LOVED IT) and I got really good at explaining my story, unpacking my childhood, and understanding my patterns. And while it helped in some ways, the pain never shifted. Then one day, a therapist said to me: “Have you ever looked into how suppressed emotions can show up as pain in the body?”
That one sentence changed everything.
It led me inside a somatic therapy room for the first time and I never looked back. I started with EFT tapping as my first experience into the somatic world to help me deal with an awful phobia / OCD thoughts that I had around my pain condition. For the first time, I realised that my pain wasn’t just “physical” and my healing wasn’t going to come from just talking about it or taking another supplement. The pain was living in my nervous system, in my fascia, in my muscles, in the cellular memory of my body, and in the parts of me I’d never been taught to pay attention to. As a busy, Type A intellectualiser (ex-lawyer, now entrepreneur), I had got very good at thinking about my feelings. Somatic therapy helped me see that I needed to reconnect with my body.
Somatic therapy didn’t just help me manage my pain. It helped me understand it, process it, and eventually release it. It rewired the way I relate to my body, my emotions, and my life.
In this post, I want to explain what somatic therapy is, why it works, and how it can change the way you think about healing forever.
What Is Somatic Therapy
The word somatic comes from the Greek word soma, meaning “body.” That’s important because before somatic therapy came into the mainstream, our best approach to stress and healing was talking about it, and very rarely thinking about how it can impact us biologically. Talk therapy has its place. It’s powerful (in fact, I run one of the biggest therapy podcasts globally, I love it that much) but it works almost exclusively on the conscious mind, the part of your brain that’s logical, linear, and likes to think it’s in control.
Here’s the plot twist: your conscious mind, the part you live in day to day, is not actually running the show. Your day to day life is controlled by the subconscious mind, the 95% of you that you don’t see, think, or engage with on a daily basis.
The Subconscious Mind
Even in the medical world, the subconscious mind is still somewhat of a mystery. There’s no universally agreed definition, no clear map of where it “lives” in the brain or body, and no MRI scan that can capture it in full. But in the holistic healing world, we see it differently. We know the subconscious isn’t just “in your head.” It’s wired through every single cell of your body. It’s in your muscle memory, your fascia, your breath patterns, your posture, and your hormonal rhythms. It’s the invisible operating system running in the background constantly, whirring like a computer, storing every emotional imprint you’ve ever had, from the moment you were born (and some would say, even before). When you start to understand that, you realise why healing can’t just be about talking or thinking your way out of pain. You have to work with the body where that subconscious wiring lives.
Why the Body Matters (and Introducing Trauma)
Your nervous system is constantly scanning the world around you and the world inside you because it has one job, to keep you safe, away from threat, and ultimately alive. The body matters because the subconscious mind is wired throughout it like the hard drive of your life, quietly logging everything. Not just the big, obvious moments, but the micro-experiences that felt even loosely threatening, scary, emotional, dangerous, overwhelming, or confusing at the time. The stuff you brushed off. The stuff you “got over.” The stuff you pushed down or were laughed at for. The stuff you thought didn’t matter. The things you never said out loud, as well as the big, very real, very stressful things you might have gone through too. Your subconscious stores it all, into the reptilian complex and the limbic system (wired throughout our body) because its main job is to make sure you remember what could hurt you so you don’t repeat it.
The 80/20 Rule
What is overlooked in the medical world and the talk therapy world is that your feelings do not originate in your mind. In fact, around 80% of your feelings and emotions start in the body and travel up to the brain to be logged and registered. Only about 20% start in the brain and travel down. This is why you cannot truly heal without working through the body. Your brain and body are in constant conversation via the vagus nerve, the superhighway that connects them. The health of that nerve directly impacts the health of your nervous system. Poor vagal tone (a weak, underactive vagus nerve) means an intense stress response, big emotional reactions, quick dysregulation, and eventually, poor health. Strong vagal tone means better stress regulation, a calmer emotional baseline, and even lower inflammation throughout the body.
The Ideal Nervous System Response
In a healthy, well-regulated nervous system, here’s how things play out when a threat appears: a distressing event happens and both your body and mind register overwhelm, fear. Your brain and body instantly activate for survival, shifting the nervous system into high alert. But then, the stressor ends. The brain receives the “all clear,” the threat is gone, and the system begins to recover. You might cry or even shake, both natural ways the body releases stored stress. Crying actually helps cleanse and metabolise the stress hormones and emotional charge left behind. Once that release happens, you return to baseline, calm, and balance.
But What Really Happens: How Stressful Events Get Stored in the Body
For most of us, the stress cycle doesn’t get completed. We don’t finish it and we get stuck. The energy of our emotions isn’t processed or released, and if it doesn’t go out, it goes down. Those unprocessed emotions get stored in the body, the body keeps the score. So few of us are ever taught how to face or release what we feel, and our subconscious often decides it’s not safe to even try. Instead, we intellectualise our feelings, analysing them in our heads without ever truly feeling them in our bodies. That’s how people can go through enormous pain or trauma and still appear “fine” — they’ve split off from their body as a survival strategy. But when we don’t process or release, we hold onto everything, and every experience, big or small, gets logged into the cellular memory of the body.
And the result? Many of us were not taught how to work through these big feelings and overwhelming sensations. We did not have parents who mirrored us or moved through the process with us. We learned to shut down, to disconnect, to not feel, or to feel like we are “too much.” This leads to many of us becoming grade A intellectualisers, living in our heads, disconnected from the sensations in our bodies, and constantly distracting ourselves so we don’t have to feel the discomfort inside of us.
Intellectualisers live in their head, thinking about feelings instead of feeling them. On the surface, they look self-aware and “together,” but the more they avoid uncomfortable sensations, the harder it is to regulate emotions when they inevitably arise. This coping style often forms in childhood when feeling emotions was unsafe, overwhelming, or simply not modelled. So they learned to retreat into the mind for a faux sense of safety and control. Over time, their interoceptive system, the part of the nervous system that tracks sensations inside the body, becomes turned down, making it even harder to drop in and truly feel. The truth is, no one ever taught us how to process emotions, so for intellectualisers, reconnecting with the body isn’t just about healing, it’s about learning an entirely new language of safety, sensation, and self-trust.
How Somatic Therapy Works: Tuning Into Internal Sensations
Somatic therapy is about learning to tune into what’s happening inside you, slowly, gently, and without judgement. We’re not rushing to “fix” or “release” anything. We’re building awareness, safety, and connection to the language of the body so we can hold the sensations, build better coping mechanisms, and release the stories attached to them.
Some practitioners like to break somatic therapy down into the following stages:
Step 1 – Awareness
You can’t change what you’re not aware of. The first step is simply noticing and becoming curious about your internal world without pressure to do anything about it yet. Be curious about your thoughts, sensations, and reactions.
Step 2 – Building Safety
We slow down and start to drop into our body to see if we can identify any sensations. While doing so, we create a sense of safety inside the body. That might mean placing a hand on your heart, wrapping your arms around yourself, or humming softly. Can you feel anything at all? Maybe it’s warmth, a tingle, or even nothing — all of it is welcome. There’s no shame here, just observation. A felt sense of safety really comes through feeling and connecting with ourselves.
Step 3 – Regulation or De-Escalation
Once we feel safe enough, we move through the feelings in a way that grounds us — breathwork, walking, painting, or any flow-state activity that brings you into connection with your body and emotions. The aim isn’t to disconnect or dissociate, but to be with what’s there while gently calming the system.
Step 4 – Integration
Here’s where we start a dialogue with the sensations. They are the body’s data, windows into what’s really going on. Ask yourself: what movement does my body want? Can I feel an expansion when I think about something joyful or exciting? A contraction when I think about something painful? This is how you start to learn the language of your body.
Step 5 – Release
Release is the final step, but not in the “just get rid of it” way. You’re not meant to bypass emotions; you’re meant to actively work with them, feel them fully, and understand what they’re here to tell you. Once they’ve done their job and informed you, you can take aligned action. That’s when they naturally move through the nervous system and out of the body.
The Tools You’ll See in Somatic Therapy
In somatic therapy, we use a wide range of tools to work directly with the body and nervous system, helping you process, regulate, and integrate emotions on a physiological level.
Breathwork – Can either up-regulate (energise) or down-regulate (calm) your nervous system depending on what you need in the moment.
Humming – Stimulates the vagus nerve, helping the body switch into rest-and-digest mode while strengthening vagal tone, which can put the brakes on the body’s stress response.
EFT Tapping – Combines acupressure points with affirmations to release stored emotional charge from past memories and experiences.
Somatic Shaking – Discharges built-up stress energy from the muscles and fascia, allowing the toxic byproducts of stress to move through the body.
Somatic Experiencing – A therapeutic approach that gently guides you to process trauma and stored survival responses at a pace your nervous system can handle.
EMDR Therapy – Uses bilateral stimulation to help reprocess traumatic memories and reduce their emotional charge.
Hypnosis – Helps access the subconscious mind to reframe and release deeply embedded patterns.
Dance and Movement – Encourages emotional release, body awareness, and joy through free movement.
Meditation – Brings attention to the present moment and cultivates mindful awareness of sensations, thoughts, and emotions.
Singing, Shouting, or Chanting – Uses the voice and breath to stimulate the vagus nerve, release tension, and create emotional expression.
Flow-State Activities – Any creative or physical activity that absorbs your full attention, helping regulate the nervous system and shift your state naturally.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) – Systematically tensing and releasing different muscle groups to release stored tension and reconnect with bodily sensations.
Grounding Practices – Using touch, texture, temperature, or sensory focus to anchor yourself in the present moment.
TRE (Trauma Release Exercises) – A series of physical shaking-esque movements designed to activate the body’s natural tremoring mechanism for stress and trauma release.
Body Scanning – Mindfully bringing awareness to different parts of the body to notice sensation, tension, or emotion.
Touch and Self-Massage – Using therapeutic touch, either self-administered or from a practitioner, to release tension, connect inwards and soothe the nervous system.
Nature Immersion (Ecotherapy) – Using sensory experiences in nature to regulate the nervous system and foster safety.
Somatic Therapy Isn’t Just Releasing
A truth that some people in the wellness world are not grasping? Your nervous system doesn’t need more ice baths or a dramatic purge. It needs more internal safety and curiosity. Nervous system and somatic healing isn’t about never feeling certain emotions again. It’s about:
Getting better at experiencing them (we call this increasing our capacity)
Containing them without being overwhelmed by them or shutting down, running away, or getting stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
Processing them in real time (often through active movement, breath, etc.)
Coming back to your baseline and a state of regulation faster
If your first reaction is to “get it out” as quickly as possible, that’s a sign your emotional capacity is too small or your understanding of somatic therapy is too narrow. The work is about building that capacity slowly so you can experience a happier, healthier life.
Go Slow — Titration Is Key
For those who have gone through trauma, somatic therapy needs to work at the pace of your slowest nervous system pathway. This is called titration — microdosing the sensations and emotions you’ve been avoiding for a lifetime so they don’t overwhelm your system and cause shut down. It’s important to understand that going in with intense breathwork or intense ice baths is not the best idea. Start small, increase your ability to be with discomfort slowly.
Bit by bit, you increase your ability to be with discomfort without panicking. As you do, you build the three essential love languages of the parasympathetic nervous system:
Safety
Embodiment
Connection (to ourselves and others)
When you can give yourself these three consistently, you become emotionally safe inside your own body. And that’s when real healing begins — not just when you’ve let go of the past, but when you’ve learned to live inside yourself without fear.
