Somatic Trauma-Informed Psychotherapy
Trauma leaves behind more than a story. It is held in your biology, and it keeps shaping how your system responds long after the event has passed — often without your conscious awareness or permission.
Trauma is not only the bad things that happen to you. Trauma is also the good things that should have happened and didn’t.
This might be your door if
- You understand your history perfectly well, and understanding it hasn’t changed how you feel.
- Your body reacts before your thoughts arrive: the flinch, the tight chest, the sudden flatness.
- You’ve told the story in therapy before and felt worse afterwards, not lighter.
- You’re functioning. You’re just doing it from a long way away.
- You feel hypervigilant, constantly on alert, or unable to fully relax.
- You are living with ongoing health challenges or physical symptoms that affect how you feel.
- You carry persistent beliefs of being unworthy, not good enough, or fundamentally broken.
- You have ADD or ADHD and would like to understand your nervous system, emotions and patterns of regulation better.
- You feel stuck, even though you understand intellectually why you feel or behave the way you do.
- You fear judgement, rejection or abandonment.
- You doubt yourself constantly, or struggle to trust your own thoughts, feelings and decisions.
- You often feel like you don’t fit in, or that you don’t truly belong.
- You withdraw from relationships, or find it difficult to feel close to people.
- You struggle to set and keep healthy boundaries.
- You put other people’s needs, feelings or expectations ahead of your own.
- You are highly self-critical, or find it hard to accept yourself.
- You are living with low mood, sadness or depression.
- You repeat behaviours, coping strategies or relationship patterns that aren’t good for you.
- You struggle with emotional regulation, or with intense emotions and nervous-system responses.
- You have lived through something traumatic or overwhelming: an accident, the loss of someone you love, violence, immigration, war, a natural disaster, a medical event or diagnosis, losing your health, losing someone to suicide.
- You live with physical pain.
- You rely on strategies that once helped you survive and are now causing difficulties in your life.
What actually happens
We start by finding out what steady feels like in your body, so there’s somewhere to return to. That part isn’t a warm-up. It’s the ground everything else stands on.
Then we go towards the difficult material in small pieces, and we stop before it’s too much. Not because the material is fragile, but because your nervous system learns safety through repetition, not through endurance.
A detailed retelling of your history is never required. We work with what shows up now — often with what’s happening in the room.
What actually happens in a first somatic therapy sessionComplex trauma
Complex trauma is what forms when the harm wasn’t one afternoon but a climate: years of it, usually early, usually inside the relationships or places that were supposed to be safe — home, school. Nothing about it may look like an event you could name.
What it leaves behind is rarely a memory. It’s a way of being organised: always scanning, always adapting, always a little outside yourself. Childhood trauma of this kind can shape self-worth, boundaries, trust and the way you relate to yourself and to others. That organisation was intelligent at the time. It kept you safe with the options a child actually had.
So this is the longer work, and it goes in the order that holds: first enough safety and resilience to be in your own body at all, then the material. Skipping to the material is how people get overwhelmed and conclude that therapy doesn’t work for them. Trying to process the whole story at once risks overwhelm and re-traumatisation; instead we move in tiny, titrated doses.
Single-event trauma
Sometimes there is one thing. A crash, an assault, a birth, a death, a diagnosis, a medical event — a night that split your life into before and after. You may remember it in detail, and you may still find your body reacting as though it were ongoing.
That’s not you failing to move on. It’s a survival response that never got to finish, and it stays switched on. After a traumatic event some people go on to experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): feeling constantly on edge, easily startled, avoiding the places or situations that bring it back, intrusive memories or nightmares, or a sense of being disconnected from yourself and the world. Symptoms and needs vary, so we take the time to understand your experience rather than assume a diagnosis. The work is helping your system complete what it started and register that now it’s over.
This tends to be shorter work than complex trauma, though I won’t put a number on it before I’ve met you. Where there’s one event and your life was otherwise steady, people often notice a shift within a few months. That said, PTSD is often linked to childhood trauma as well.
Why healing trauma often requires looking beyond the eventChildhood trauma and attachment wounds
Childhood trauma can also lead to PTSD. But when trauma was repeated or prolonged, or happened inside important relationships — especially where there was no safe person or place to escape to — it can shape development, relationships, self-worth and the way you relate to your own emotions and your own body. This is often what we mean by complex trauma or complex PTSD (C-PTSD), and it usually asks for a different kind of approach and a longer period of support.
In this work we can explore an attachment wound, the attachment style you recognise in yourself, and the beliefs that formed around safety, closeness and self-worth. Some people arrive with a diagnosis of complex PTSD; others don’t. Either way, we begin with your experience and what you need, not with a label.
What this isn’t
It is not a quick fix, and not a technique that resets your nervous system. Healing here isn’t about fixing yourself: it’s about developing a deeper awareness of the patterns, adaptations, emotions and nervous-system responses that formed in answer to what you lived.
It is not massage, bodywork, chiropractic treatment or physiotherapy, and I am not treating a physical condition. If your symptoms need a doctor, they need a doctor, and I’ll say so.
It is also not only about the body. Sensation matters, and so do your emotions, your thoughts, your relationships, your memories and your history — somatic work holds them together rather than choosing between them.
At its core this is a process of becoming more aware of yourself, and of building the capacity to stay present with your own inner experience. From that awareness, new possibilities for choice, connection and regulation start to appear.
Common questions
- Do I have to talk about what happened?
- No. You don’t need to give a detailed retelling for this to help. Much of the work can focus on what is happening for you now: sensations, emotions, nervous-system responses, beliefs, impulses, patterns. If and when you want to put your experience into words, that’s your choice.
- How is this different from the talk therapy I’ve already tried?
- Standard talk therapy usually stays with your thoughts and the stories you remember. Somatic work includes that insight, and also attends to how your history lives in your biology and in the quiet habits of your nervous system. We can look at the story while becoming curious about the sensations and emotional responses arriving right now — a way to reach the roots of patterns that never learned words. You might know intellectually that you are worthy or capable; through embodiment, that knowing begins to land in your body and in your everyday choices. The aim is a deeper connection with yourself, including your authenticity, your intuition and your inner wisdom.
- Is this going to take years?
- Sometimes, and sometimes not. Single-event work is often shorter than complex trauma. I won’t give you a number before I’ve met you, and I won’t keep you longer than the work needs.
- What if I start and it’s too much?
- Then we slow down, and that is a normal part of the work rather than a failure. We build capacity first and go at the pace your system can hold. You stay in charge of what we explore.
Before we start, one important thing
This therapy is not a substitute for crisis or safety intervention. It isn't appropriate if you are currently in an unsafe or dangerous situation, or if you are at immediate risk of harming yourself or ending your life. In those circumstances you need crisis, emergency or specialised support first.
Somatic psychotherapy is also unsuitable for people who have recently faced, or are currently facing, legal allegations.
You might also be looking at
Somatic Experiencing — Dr Peter Levine approach
Somatic Counselling
Ready to start?
Book a first session, or write to me if you'd rather ask something before you do.