What Is Somatic Therapy, and What Can You Expect in a Session

A question I am asked often, by people considering working with me for the first time, is simple: what actually happens in a session. What does somatic therapy mean and what does it look like in practice.

So I want to take you inside it. What this work is, what to expect, how to prepare, and why it can feel like nothing you have done before, even if you have done a lot of therapy already.

Somatic therapy is body led, not head led

Most of us have spent years talking about our lives. Naming patterns, understanding childhood, tracing the why behind the way we feel and behave. That work has value. But it has a limit. Insight alone rarely changes the body's response.

Somatic therapy works differently. It is body processing therapy, which means we work with what is happening in the body in real time, not just the story about what happened. We track sensation, tension, breath, impulse, stillness. The body holds what the mind has often moved past, and it is willing to show us if we slow down enough to notice.

This is slow work. And it is revolutionary precisely because it is slow.

In a culture that wants fast fixes and quick resolution, choosing to slow down and actually feel what is happening in your body is its own quiet act of rebellion. It asks you to trust a different kind of intelligence, one that lives below thought.

What actually happens in session

Every session is a safe, co-regulated space. That means I am not sitting back observing you from a distance. My own nervous system is present and engaged, helping to create a felt sense of safety that your body can borrow from until it remembers how to find that safety on its own.

You lead. I do not direct you toward where I think you should go. Together we build connection with your body, learning to understand and read what your nervous system is communicating, often for the first time in your life.

The work moves through several threads, woven together rather than worked through in a strict order:

Parts work. Meeting the different parts of you that protect, grieve, react and hold the patterns you live by. Each part has a function, even the ones that feel difficult, and the work is about understanding rather than eliminating them.

Motherline repair. Tending attachment style and the inherited patterns that run through the maternal lineage. This is not about your personal mother specifically. It is about the deeper rupture with life and self that moves through generations, and finding our way back into relationship with it.

Resourcing. Building internal and external resources that help your body feel supported and held. A resource might be a memory, an image, a sensation, a place, anything that the body can return to when it needs steadiness.

Capacity and safety. Growing your nervous system's capacity to stay present with what arises, at a pace it can hold. We are never aiming for more than your system can metabolise in a given moment. Capacity grows slowly and it grows for good.

A new addition to the work: brainspotting

Brainspotting is a recent addition to the field, and to my own offering. It works with the simple, profound idea that where you look affects how you feel, using eye position to help the brain and body access and process what is held beneath language.

It sits naturally alongside the other approaches I use here. Not a replacement for parts work, motherline repair, or resourcing, but another doorway into the same deep terrain, one that can be especially useful when something feels stuck or hard to reach through talking or tracking sensation alone.

This might be the first time you connect with your body

For many people, this work is the first real, sustained contact they have ever had with their own body. If that is you, I want you to know that this is entirely normal, and it is supported here.

It is normal to cry. It is normal to feel anger or agitation rise. It is also entirely normal to notice nothing at all, to feel blank or unsure what you are sensing. Every presentation is exactly as it is. There is no right response and no performance required. We simply follow the enquiry into the body, wherever it leads, at whatever pace it asks for.

If you have spent your whole life living from the neck up, your body's signals may feel quiet, distant, or even absent at first. That is not failure. That is information. We start exactly where you are.

Preparing for a session

A little preparation can support the work and your nervous system before we even begin.

Bring water. Staying hydrated supports your nervous system through the work.

Find a private, comfortable space. Somewhere you will not be interrupted and can feel fully at ease.

Bring what feels nourishing. Tea, fidgets, a weighted blanket. Anything that helps your body feel held.

None of this needs to be perfect. The point is simply giving your body the conditions to feel a little safer, a little more met, before we begin the work of listening to it together.

If this is calling to you

If reading this has stirred something, the free twenty minute clarity session is a gentle place to begin. No preparation needed, no certainty required. Just a conversation about where you are and how this work could be shaped around what you are actually experiencing.

Book your free clarity session