Maybe you’ve been in therapy and found it was helpful but didn’t lead to the kind of lasting change you are hungry for.
You may have tried therapy, practiced yoga or meditation, attended retreats or workshops, done your own personal growth work, or gone down numerous self-help rabbit holes. You may have learned a lot about yourself through books, podcasts, or YouTube.
And yet, you sense there is more.
Somatic therapy dives under the surface, disrupts old patterns, and leads you somewhere new. At Movement Matters, we use somatic therapy to help you make change that is deeper, more embodied, and has a bigger impact on your life.
What Is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic.
From the Greek soma, meaning body.
We live our lives through our bodies. When we feel sad, we can have a hollow pit in our stomach. When we’re happy, a surge of warmth might flow from our feet to our face. When we say no and mean it, we feel solid and confident.
Somatic therapy is a broad term for healing approaches that support mind-body integration and well-being. This work taps into our innate ability to heal and grow by paying attention to the nervous system, the body, and the non-verbal ways we carry our experiences and express ourselves.
Somatic bodywork and movement practices, breathwork, and yoga therapy are examples of somatic therapies that are not expressly psychotherapy.
The focus of our work at Movement Matters is somatic psychotherapy, a form of somatic therapy that integrates body-centered approaches within a psychotherapeutic framework. We bring the verbal and the non-verbal together.
Somatic psychotherapy helps you change the patterns that you keep getting pulled into, no matter how much insight or understanding you already have.
On this page, when we talk about somatic therapy, we’re referring to somatic psychotherapy.
We use the terms somatic therapy and somatic psychotherapy interchangeably.
The messages we get from our body are not separate from our psychology; they are part of it.
When we work not just with the stories of our lives, but with our experiences, it brings therapy alive.
Somatic Psychotherapy
Somatic psychotherapy builds on traditional talk therapy by integrating body-centered approaches that help us pay attention to how the body and mind work together.
Two of the most well-known somatic therapy approaches are Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Peter Levine, and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP), developed by Pat Ogden. Both are body-centered and grounded in trauma research, neuroscience, attachment theory, and body-based psychology.
Somatic Experiencing® (SE)
SE primarily targets trauma healing. It places a large emphasis on nervous system regulation and completing interrupted survival responses that keep people stuck in trauma patterns. While SE is not explicitly a psychotherapy modality, it is widely used by psychotherapists as an integral component in their somatic psychotherapy work.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy® (SP)
There is a large overlap between SP and SE, particularly in working with trauma. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy grew out of the Hakomi Method and is sometimes described as a “body-based talk therapy”. It is explicitly a psychotherapeutic framework that not only addresses trauma but also focuses on attachment, relational patterns, and current life issues.
Other Approaches in Somatic Psychotherapy
Beyond Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, there are many other somatic and mind-body approaches.
Somatic psychotherapy can also be integrated with many other therapeutic approaches. Many therapists combine somatic concepts and practices with modalities such as EMDR, Brainspotting, and Internal Family Systems (IFS), as well as expressive and creative arts therapies, movement psychotherapy, and other experiential approaches.
Polyvagal Theory has contributed to contemporary thinking about the nervous system’s role in healing, connection, and resilience, influencing somatic, body-centered, and trauma-informed approaches.
Our Approach at Movement Matters
At Movement Matters, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is our primary somatic therapy framework. It provides a shared foundation for all our therapists. Each therapist also has additional training, experience, and interests that shape their unique approach.
Our therapists’ backgrounds include movement psychotherapy, mindfulness-based psychotherapy, expressive and creative arts therapies, and other experiential approaches such as EMDR, parts work, and polyvagal-informed therapy.
We don’t believe healing comes from following a rigid formula or from insight alone. We believe it emerges through curiosity, connection, experimentation, and the discovery of new possibilites for being yourself.
Our work is active, creative, and deeply personalized.
How Somatic Therapy Works
When we talk about things, we are working with what we know consciously and can put into words. This is top-down processing. It’s valuable, and it’s a part of the work we do. But so much of our experience takes place without conscious awareness.
Our life stories are expressed through posture, gesture, and movement.
The way we feel tense when we say yes to something we don’t want to. The exhale of relief when we get home after a stressful day. How we push through tiredness or pain because we don’t feel we deserve to relax.
Somatic therapy is an experiential approach which means we go from “talking about” experiences to working with the ways that thoughts, emotions, and the body are interrelated, all playing a role in how we think, feel, and move through life.
By working with the body, breath, posture, sensations, nervous system responses, and movement, we get more information about what is beneath the surface.
With a somatic approach, you can connect more deeply to what you know intuitively. You can discover more about how you actually feel, what drives you, and what you want. You can begin to move through life differently.
Talk therapy helps you understand your patterns.
Somatic therapy helps you change them.
Curious how this approach could help in your own life?
What Happens in a Somatic Therapy Session?
There’s no such thing as a “typical” somatic psychotherapy session.
Some sessions might look a lot like a typical talk therapy appointment, therapist and client sitting across from one another having a conversation, tea mugs and tissues on hand.
Other sessions might be very active, working directly with posture, gesture, or movement, seated or getting up and moving in the space. What’s different in somatic therapy is that we aren’t just paying attention to the content of the conversation. We’re interested in how the body and the nervous system participate.
A session might include:
- Learning grounding techniques to shift your state when you feel anxious or triggered
- Exploring what it feels like to take up more space, expand your breath, or move with more purpose and energy
- Recognizing that your torso collapses when you talk about a difficult argument and seeing what it’s like to remain taller and more open
- Noticing how your eyes light up when you allow yourself to share something good and let yourself feel it
At Movement Matters, our therapy sessions include mindfulness, breathwork, movement, and creative or expressive approaches to help you slow down, listen to yourself, consider what’s possible, and work with what’s actually happening right here and now.
Here’s what a therapy session with us might look like:
In our work together, we might notice that when you talk about a difficult conversation, your shoulders tighten and your breath gets shallow. We slow down and get curious about what your body is responding to.
We might find that your tension goes along with a familiar feeling that people don’t really listen to you. There might be sadness underneath, or anger, or the impulse to protect yourself from being hurt again. So, you wall off.
We might explore what it feels like to notice that in this room right now, someone is listening to you with care and attention. When you try letting your shoulders drop and sitting a little more open, you find you can take in the support rather than bracing against it. And then you can share your feelings more and learn to trust that it’s ok to try something new.
Of course, every session is a little (or a lot) different. We customize our approach to you, what you bring in, and how you’d like to work.
With Somatic Therapy, You Can:
Reconnect with yourself, your vitality, and your creativity
Feel more at home in your body, with greater ease, energy, and self-trust
Build relationships with joy and connection without losing yourself
Feel more freedom to be yourself in your relationships, work, and daily life
Feel less trapped in cycles of overthinking and more connected to your own instincts and experience
Pursue your dreams and desires with greater clarity, flexibility, and confidence (yes, really!)
When you integrate both verbal and body-based work, change becomes more coherent.
You begin to shift the way you perceive things with your brain and your body, and your patterns and habits start to change. You begin to move through your life differently.
What Somatic Therapy Helps With
Somatic therapy is well known for its effectiveness with trauma and challenges that tend to be experienced strongly in the body, like anxiety, chronic stress, and pain. But the body is part of who we are. Since it plays a role in every aspect of our lives, it makes sense to take a mind-body approach in therapy no matter what issues you are facing.
There are many ways to approach somatic therapy, and it can be adapted to work with a wide range of issues. It can look very different from one person to the next, and even from one session to the next. Somatic work can be very powerful, so what matters most is pacing it and matching it to your needs and interests.
Some people arrive eager and ready to dive in. Others feel a little hesitant or unsure. We’ll start wherever you are, and we’ll adjust our approach as your therapy unfolds.
Our Specialties
Anxiety
It’s amazing how well people can function even when anxiety perpetually runs under the surface. You can appear calm on the outside, but live with turmoil inside, which is a lonely and exhausting place to be.
Anxiety is a nervous system state as much as a thought pattern. It can lead to a constant sense of having to keep moving, pressure, or dread, along with the fear of “not getting it right” and a terrible pattern of second-guessing yourself.
Learn more about how we can help you move from inner chaos to calm »
Trauma, Complex Trauma & PTSD
Trauma is experienced in the body. Long after traumatic events or situations have passed, it keeps showing up, and keeps you stuck in the past.
The impact can range from startle responses, hypervigilance, agitation, or numbness to shame, people-pleasing, always feeling on edge, constant over-thinking, or a sense of feeling like a stranger in your own life.
Work-Life Balance
Whether you’re managing a demanding career, building a business, or holding everything together at home, it’s easy to be pulled in too many directions until you're drained and have lost a sense of how you want to live.
Burnout goes beyond tiredness; it's chronically running on empty and carrying the stress that goes with it. Your brain and body signals get lost, and it becomes hard to know what you need or even who you are underneath it all.
We can help you restore balance and reconnect with yourself. Learn more about getting started »
Chronic Pain
Chronic pain symptoms add a constant layer of distraction and discomfort. Even when you're good at pushing through, pain demands your attention and drains your energy.
Therapy for Women
Anxiety, burnout, and chronic stress often show up differently in women, who also carry the weight of expectations, the emotional labor of relationships, and the pressure of holding it all together.
We can help you reclaim yourself and to build a life filled with joy and connection. Learn more about getting started »
Therapy for Men
There are so many ideas about how men are "supposed to" handle things — think your way through problems, stay in control, keep it together. There's a cost to that, and it often leaves you feeling tense, pressured, and worn out.
We can help you go deeper than problem-solving and build a life that feels more like your own. Learn more about getting started »
Relationships
Relationship patterns are hard to change, and we find ourselves repeating them over and over no matter how much insight we develop. You can learn how to change these maps and build more satisfying relationships.
Whether you're coming to us as an individual or a couple, we work with you to get to the root of your relationship challenges and make choices that build the kinds of relationships you want to have.
LGBTQIA+
We offer inclusive, trauma-informed therapy for LGBTQIA+ clients. Many of our clients want to be able to work with someone who understands how identity, relationships, and community shape their life and impact the experience of their bodies and themselves.
All of our therapists are committed to welcoming care.
Creatives & Artists
Creativity lives in the body. It shows up in the urge to make something, the willingness to be messy, the energy that fuels ideas, the sense that something new is possible. When life gets in the way, we can lose connection to our creative and artistic drive.
We can help you find your way back to the creative part of you that can take risks, play, and go somewhere new. Learn more about getting started »
Therapy for Therapists
When therapists do their own therapy, it supports personal healing and growth, and can be a valuable resource in traveling your own life path. It also makes you a better therapist by increasing awareness of your own core beliefs, relational patterns, and blind spots; it lets you see how they might play out in your work.
Whatever brought you here, we'd be honored to walk alongside you and support your process.
Ways to Work with Us
Individual Therapy
We dive in with you to help you get more in sync with yourself and live more fully.
Couples Therapy
For couples who want new ways to connect, navigate challenges, and move through life together differently.
Somatic Therapy Intensives
Intensives offer immersive sessions in a concentrated format for deeper work.
Walk & Talk Therapy
Take therapy into nature for greater presence, perspective, and movement.
Somatic Therapy Intensives & Retreats
The richness and depth of somatic therapy make it well suited for therapy intensives, which offer extended, immersive sessions that allow for deeper work in a concentrated period of time.
Intensives at Movement Matters are available in person in Great Barrington, MA with limited online options for mini-intensives. We’re ideally located for people to travel from New York or Boston for a retreat-style therapy intensive in the Berkshires. Learn more »
When therapy includes a creative embodied approach, a different kind of change is possible.
You begin to experience your life in new ways, develop more trust in yourself, and strengthen your connection to what matters most. You discover a renewed sense of being fully alive that carries into your relationships, your work, and your everyday life.
You’re ready for therapy that leads to deeper change. We’re ready to help you get there.
Frequently Asked Questions About Somatic Therapy
What is somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy, including somatic psychotherapy, is a body-centered approach to healing that works with the nervous system, physical sensations, movement, and body awareness as core elements of healing.
Rather than focusing only on thoughts and emotions, we pay attention to the whole experience including sensations in the body, nervous system patterns, and how posture and movement reflect our emotional and relational experiences.
Somatic psychotherapy draws from neuroscience, trauma research, and attachment theory. Somatic therapy goes beneath the surface to work with the things we can’t just “talk our way out of.”
Learn more about Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a foundational approach at Movement Matters »
How is somatic therapy different from talk therapy?
Talk therapy and somatic therapy aren’t opposites; they are complementary. Somatic therapy adds a new dimension to therapy. It works with the ways the body and nervous system are an integral part of who we are and how we relate to ourselves and other people.
Talking is a part of somatic therapy; what’s different is that we’re also tracking your body’s responses, experimenting with changing your posture and movement habits, developing embodied resources, and prioritizing nervous system regulation. Somatic therapy changes the way you feel about yourself and your life.
Who is somatic therapy good for?
Somatic therapy is a good fit for a wide range of people and concerns. It’s well-suited for trauma, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, chronic stress, nervous system dysregulation, and issues where the body is a big part of the picture.
Many people who want something different from traditional talk therapy are drawn to the holistic, mind-body approach that somatic therapy offers. Somatic methods can be subtle, such as noticing breath or tension, or more active and expressive, such as working with movement or gesture. A skilled somatic therapist adapts their approach to fit each person’s comfort level, interests, and what they are working on.
Does somatic therapy help with trauma?
Trauma is a body-based experience, making somatic therapy ideally suited to support healing. Survival responses from trauma impact the nervous system and drive symptoms long after the trauma has passed. Somatic therapy can address trauma resulting from single overwhelming events as well as ongoing or complex trauma.
Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy were both developed to work with the physiological aspects of trauma and the ways they impact our emotional experience. With somatic therapy, you can do more than make sense of the story. You can feel, in your body, that the trauma is over and in the past.
Does somatic therapy help with anxiety?
Somatic therapy can be a highly effective approach for people with anxiety because it works directly with the nervous system and the mind-body connection. Anxiety affects the body as much as thoughts and emotions, sometimes even when you don’t realize it.
Somatic therapy can be especially helpful for high-functioning anxiety, chronic stress, anxiety with strong physical symptoms, or anxiety that feels stuck even with therapy. Clients can learn to get out of their heads, feel more grounded, and live more fully.
Is somatic therapy right for me?
Somatic therapy may be a good fit if you’re drawn to a deeper, more experiential way of working. One that builds on insight by including the wisdom of the body.
Whether you’re beginning therapy or looking to deepen work you’ve already done, somatic therapy offers another way of understanding yourself and creating lasting change.
Is somatic therapy evidence-based?
Somatic therapy approaches, including Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, are grounded in neuroscience, attachment theory, and trauma research.
These methods are endorsed by leading clinicians and experts worldwide. There is a growing body of research supporting their effectiveness, particularly for trauma, PTSD, and anxiety. And in clinical practice, clients experience real and lasting change.
Is somatic therapy the same as Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic therapy and Somatic Experiencing are related, but they aren’t the same thing. Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, is one specific somatic therapy approach.
Somatic therapy is a broader term that encompasses Somatic Experiencing and other body-centered approaches including Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, developed by Pat Ogden, the Hakomi Method, and others.
At Movement Matters, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is our primary framework. If you came here searching for Somatic Experiencing, we’re happy to talk about how our work compares, and whether it might be a good fit for you.
Are EMDR or Internal Family Systems (IFS) forms of somatic therapy?
EMDR and Internal Family Systems (IFS) both work with the nervous system in different ways and share important similarities with somatic therapy. The way they’re practiced can vary quite a bit, and both can be approached through a body-centered, somatic lens.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) helps the nervous system process experiences we haven’t been able to move past. Internal Family Systems works with the different parts of us to help us understand and communicate better with ourselves.
At Movement Matters, we weave in concepts from EMDR and IFS to support clients’ needs and goals.
Can somatic therapy be done online?
Yes. Somatic therapy can be very effective online. The body is present wherever you are, and telehealth work can be unexpectedly creative and connected.
At Movement Matters, we offer online somatic therapy in Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Maine, and Florida.
Why is change so hard?
Humans are wired for change. If you’ve heard of neuroplasticity, that’s what it’s all about: the brain’s capacity to form new patterns, which leads to new thoughts, feelings and behaviors. So, why is it so hard?
We are wired for change, but we are also wired for habit. It’s a way for our brains to be efficient. This is great because we don’t have to re-learn to tie our shoes every day, but it also means we can get stuck on autopilot in ways that hold us back.
Somatic therapy takes advantage of neuroplasticity so that you can slow down, rewire, and change the patterns that keep you stuck.
About the Author
Annabelle Coote, MA, LMHC, BC-DMT has been practicing somatic, body-centered, and creative approaches to psychotherapy for over 25 years. She is a licensed mental health counselor, certified Sensorimotor Psychotherapist, and board-certified dance/movement therapist. She is the founder and director of Movement Matters Integrative Psychotherapy. Annabelle loves weaving together the art and science of therapy.
Movement Matters offers in-person therapy and therapy intensives in the Berkshires, Western Massachusetts, as well as telehealth across Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Maine, and Florida. Clients can combine in-person and online sessions.
We welcome clients of all identities, backgrounds, and orientations.